The most popular content remains in the keep of a small and shrinking bunch.
Why is this so? The answer is obvious, say critics of deregulation: A firm that owns a great swath of the traditional media has phenomenal leverage on new platforms.
A Web site may be great but it becomes even greater, and only really valuable, when you also own TV stations and newspapers.
"Having a lot of people jumping around with Web sites doesn't prove that a monopoly doesn't have power," says Robert McChesney, a media scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "If in fact the growth of all these Web sites and cable channels and satellite radio and blogs and instant messaging -- if it meant that owning a TV station didn't give you any power, why would people be spending $300 million buying a TV station when they could build a hundred Web sites instead?" Why? Because TV still matters.
Newspapers still matter. And the Web, while it's growing in importance, is still no match.
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