who owns what

I'm sitting here with my roommate watching the Sugar Bowl, when one of the announcers made a comment likening LSU to the race horse Seabiscuit, and commented on what a "wonderful family movie" that was. This made me wonder if the announcers were performing implicit advertising for their corporate parents... So I turned to the internet to discover that Seabiscuit was made by Universal Studios, which is owned by Vivendi, which is separate from Disney, the parent company of the Sugar Bowl coverage provider ABC.

So the announcer has been vindicated, and I found a great site in the process. The Columbia Journalism Review has brought us Who Owns What, a website tracing the holdings of all the major media outlets. The results can be staggering, especially for known giants like Disney, Viacom, News Corp (aka Fox, which looks like it controls just about all print journalism in Australia), and, of course, the biggest of all, Time Warner. Please spend some time browsing through this. You will be amazed just how much diverse (and not so diverse) media is owned by so few organizations. Pretty soon they'll own your mama.