Shark-Like Domination

“Since the mid-1980’s, major media companies had been engaged in a feeding frenzy, swallowing up other media firms to form ever-larger conglomerates."

Croteau and Hoynes use this imagery in the very beginning of their text. Immediately I thought of a media-food chain, where it was “natural” for a bigger company to consume a smaller one. I found the large media giants to be like sharks, considering that sharks are at the top of the aquatic food chain. In nature, there isn’t a controlling force that mediates who can eat whom, much like the how the media giants had little restriction on which companies they may absorb after the elimination of financial interest and syndication laws and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Additionally, sharks have a symbiotic relationship with remora fish, as the two become a team. Remora fish eat the bacteria off of sharks, providing food for the remora and a healthy clean exterior for the shark. There is a comparison easily made between the remora-shark relationship and the synergism between the small companies and the media giants. Croteau and Hoynes say, “Synergy refers to the dynamic where components of a company work together to produce benefits that would be impossible for a single, separately operated unit of the company.”