What is a Media Conglomerate? I sure as hell did not know even how to pronounce conglomerate until somebody mentioned it to me. It is, according to dictionary.com, a corporation consisting of a number of subsidiary companies or divisions in a variety of unrelated industries, usually as a result of merger or acquisition.
A Media Conglomerate is where companies own other companies related to mass media such as television, radio, publishing, movies, and the Internet. The top 3 largest media conglomerates is News Corporation or NASDAQ, Time Warner, and The Walt Disney Company-where CBS Corporation, Viacom, and Dreamworks are also high end competetors (more are listed on Wikipedia).
I researched into this mess since it relates with our class and came upon an interesting story about how Walt Disney is trying to become and alliance with Dreamworks studios.
What are their morals I asked? Why are they doing this if they are the most successful conglomerate around?
In Vidhi Chaudhri's paper from Purdue, titled Corporate social responsibility and the media: What the Big Five media corporations are communicating about their social responsibilities, she states that Walt Disney's company values' and Code of Ethics are "integrity, honesty, trust, respect, fair play, and teamwork"(17). They are diverse with equal oppertunities for workers just like they don't want to show smoking because they want to show concern with societal welfare.
So when it comes down to teaming up with Dreamworks, how is this "diverse, equal opportunity" going to help people when all they really want is to make connections with famous director Speilberg?
Its not going to give big opportunities as they promoted, it is going to lose more jobs and key into the big time money maker. Because of the economic loss these past few years, Disney is beggining to have a downfall and they are producing fewer movies each year to help their budget. "Disney's long-held position as the world's largest media conglomerate by market value has come into jeopardy: It stood at $36 billion on Friday, while Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500) was nearly $35 billion" states Richard Siklos from CNN money news. Disney-ABC conglomerate cut 400 jobs in January, Nellie Andreeva from hollywoodreporter.com "the job cuts represent about 5% of Disney-ABC TV Group's payroll."
SO... what I conclude:
The Walt Disney conglomerate is not honestly trying to team up with Dreamworks for good family values, but to get ahold of Speilberg and his famous directing skills of movies such as Roger Rabbit and his new movie TinTin. Disney wants a peice of the success from TinTin and of the sequel to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made by Dreamworks, since it was such already a huge success. this is to help the budget of Disney and this baffles me leading to my next question:
How is this helping and giving people diverse oppertunies with their code of ethics, when they are firing people left and right to then bring in Dreamworks to make bank?
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