Media Map

For this group task we were asked to select a theme in the media and consider the varying implications of media concentration and convergence. At first we didn't know how to go about it but then we helped each other by discussing what we should do. Basically we chose a large company like Disney and explained what smaller companies they own using a poster.
My group decided to look at CTV which is Canada's largest broadcaster. First we looked at the website that was provided to us by Mark, http://www.yourmedia.ca/. We all took some time to read a few of the articles on the site an soon realized that almost all small corporations are owned by only a few larger ones. The sites we looked at for our information were Wikipedia, newsmedia.ca, CTV's website and we watched a couple videos on YouTube.
We split up and each looked at different sites. We gathered all our information individually and then met back up to discuss what we would use on our map and what we wouldn't use. It was a collaborative effort to put the actual map together.
The fact that so few large companies own so many smaller ones is appalling to me. This makes a lot of news the same on many broadcasters and often bias or opinionated because it is coming from the same source. Before doing this project I had an idea that some companies owned smaller ones but I didn't think it was to this large of a degree.
This taught my group and I that we must be careful when watching the news because information is just recycled through different sources which are owned by one company. In order to be sure we are seeing all sides of the story we have to get our news from different sources that are owned by separate companies.
There is a video my group and I watched to get a better understanding of how media ownership works. The link for this video is http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q2qUjw0Z7gs.