> This sort of confirms my suspicion that the major news corporations in the United States are not really in business to make money, any more than state-funded news outlets in China or Russia are.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/interlocking-directorat...

When big-time investors, ultra wealthy or large institutions, purchase corporate stock it often isn't done as any sort of "long term retirement investment" like small time individual investors do.

They purchase the stock because they want control over that company for some purpose. Usually it is tied into other investments they own.

So one company pay purchase another in order to intentionally run it into the ground. They can leverage it, liquidate it, eliminate competition, etc. Like what is suspected motivation the parent company of Bass Pro purchasing Cabela.

In the case of major media corporations like CNN the value these companies represent isn't necessary the operational revenue they receive from advertisements or subscriptions. These companies may be attractive because of the influence they have over the American public.

So that would help to explain why CNN did weird things like fire people criticizing the government's position in the lead up to the Iraq wars. It could be that CNN ownership had some stake in other companies that had the potential to profit significantly from the war.

> Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates and their affiliates

Well that then brings up the second problem and third problems.

Second problem:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp

I worked in an extremely "captured" industries in the past. For example, voting machines.

These corporations were regulated to such an extent that it was impossible for any new corporation to be created to compete with them.

In effect the 3 or 4 major corporations providing voting machines were the only voting machine companies that could ever possibly exist. It simply wasn't financially feasible for anybody else to make voting machines and be profitable.

The multi-years-long certification process, close governmental relationships, the constant lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits made any sort of major investment in the area financial suicide.

Because they are so regulated they are effectively above the law. The government can't afford to see them go out of business. It's cheaper and easier to keep them profitable then it would be to go back and change all the voting machine regulations in order to allow real competition.

And because of that these companies have real influence and power. It is bizarre and counter intuitive, but it's also how it works out in real life.

I experienced this first-hand. And I know that the same problems exist in other highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals.

This is why all the generic companies are now owned by all the name brand companies. The government changed the rules in the 2000's to make creating new generic companies infeasible financially. This then allowed all the bigger pharma companies to buy up all the smaller ones.

Which means that the laws and relationships that these companies have with the Federal government to constrain them actually end up increasing their power and influence.

There is a lot more to it then I mentioned here, but some visual reinforcement of how this ends up working is:

https://www.geke.us/VennDiagrams.html

> conglomerates and their affiliates

Conglomerates exist because of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. They don't make sense otherwise.

Conglomerates are corporations that have positions in many different industries. So a conglomerate may own a media business, a defense contractor business, a factory in china that produces children's toys, and 30% of a shipping company.
Or whatever.

The point is that they own a lot of positions in lots of different industries. This way they can still grow as corporations and get bigger and bigger without running into monopoly or anti-trust problems.

In effect they are a hack around regulatory restrictions.

And they are not nearly as popular as they used to be.

During the 60's and 70's people just assumed that conglomerates would take over the entire world. That they had a special sort of modern corporate governance that was ultra-efficient and simply out competed every other form of business in existence.

They would go around and use their vast asset resources to leverage loans to buy up and often liquidate smaller companies and roll that money into new acquisitions. etc etc.

People would defend this behavior as it is just a way to increase the efficiency of the market by eliminating all these poorly performing and older smaller firms.

The reality was that they were playing accounting games and engaging in borderline fraud. It was effectively a hack around crappy regulations that many politicians and bureaucrats in the government happily conspired with in exchange for huge amounts of personal wealth and political funding.

This whole system failed and conglomerates are very unfashionable nowadays.

But before they did they managed to wipe out most of the industry in the mid-west, among other things.