‘Six Corporations Own 90 Percent of News Media’ – Truth or Fiction? A graphic criticizing media consolidation in the U.S. has continued to linger online in spite of not only a changing corporate landscape, but its own inaccuracies. The graphic, and its myriad spinoff memes, is based around the claim that just six corporations — CBS, Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, and Viacom — own 90 percent of American “media.” One popular iteration was posted in Business Insider in June 2012 with seemingly no effort to corrorobate its origins or sourcing: Even as it promoted the meme, the website added its own disclaimer: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE [General Electric] does not own NBC (or Comcast or any media) anymore. So that 6th company is now Comcast. And Time Warner doesn’t own AOL, so Huffington Post isn’t affiliated with them. Variations on the graphic continue to circulate online, seemingly in perpetuity: But at least one such meme takes the claim in an even more extreme direction, rewording it to state, “There are 1,500 newspapers, 1,100 magazines, 9,000 radio stations, 15,000 TV stations, 24,000 publishers owned by only 6 cor