People become accustomed to the age old saying of “that’s progress” in any business transaction, including those of mergers and acquisitions. The big companies rise to dominate the market, while the small and weaker ones either struggle to compete, or go out of business. This occurred in the print publishing industry during the 1960’s, as publishing houses merged and sales outlets were being consolidated. Though big businesses are stereotypically deemed as bad for society-with some just cause to those claims, people must also realize the great positives that may arise from such conglomerates.
Positives of conglomerates in print publishing include a powerful focus on the substance (quality) of the material that is being published for the public, as well as a virtually unedited telling and account of the information published, as a reduced market competition leads to less inclined prompts for companies to make their work ‘interesting hot items.’ These two benefits alone leads to further positives for society: people are better informed and aware of what’s taking place, can make clear and well informed decisions, learn more and gather better perspectives, etc…
Negative effects, on the other hand can occur, which include the typical cases of: loss of jobs, reduced competition, less content on certain genres being published, and the like. When little companies are being dominated, after a while they will surely go out of business—this in itself leads to several problems. For one, people lose their jobs, and unemployment increases altogether. Further still, when a company goes out of business, it means there’s one less player in the market, and reduced competition could then possibly lead to higher prices for goods—absolute worst case scenario would be if a company rose to the power of a near monopoly. When companies are acquired by others through the likes of mergers, it could lead the controlled company to be regulated by its new owner. This effectively could kill off certain content that was published, due to the fact that the owning company deems it ‘not important’ to the whole company’s grand scheme of business. Additionally, Freedom of Speech can very realistically be threatened, since opinions that originally have been voiced (through being printed, of course) are now being ‘silenced’ since the parent company doesn’t agree with it or feel it’s something that needs to be announced. So like most things in life, there’s both good and bad that come from such scenarios of actions taking place.
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