Over 40 years ago, Mad Magazine ran a devastating satire on daily newspapers, creating a fake newspaper called the Daily Monopoly, which conveyed contempt for the readership by reporting on the publisher's family and making up words to fill out the crossword puzzle. The idea was that a one-newspaper city is stuck with a newspaper that can do whatever it wants because it's the only game in town.

Back in the 1960's, there were more newspapers in circulation than today, so the Daily Monopoly was as realistic as an episode of the Twilight Zone (also from the early 1960's) showing futuristic computers the size of a small horse barn. No one could have imagined that 40 years later, computers with 100x the capacity of those room-size monoliths would fit in the palm of your hand. And Mad Magazine could not have imagined that the Daily Monopoly satirized in its pages would come true in 2007.

A summary of the state of the media monopoly is here. Every year, more and more newspapers and other news outlets fall into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations whose primary concern in profit, not investigative or provocative reporting. The news consumer (as the media corporations call us) learns less and less about current events, and eventually people run off to war to get their asses blown off because they knew nothing about war other than glory and manhood.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the most respected newspapers in the country. Everyone knows that its editorial pages are written by right-wing ideologues, but its news pages are well-written and responsible, at least under today's standards. The Wall Street Journal would never put Paris Hilton's photo on the front page, and it does not just cover business news but national and international news.

At the other end of the news spectrum is a billionaire rightist named Rupert Murdoch, who has gobbled up newspaper after newspaper and also owns the Republican-dominated Fox News. Concerns about the real media monopoly focus on guys like Murdoch, who turns real newspapers into sensationalist and gory tabloids, insulting the reader with bullshit stories to fit the publisher's political agenda and listerally screaming at the neighborhood with enormous headlines that dominate the front page. Any New Yorker will tell you that Murdoch's New York Post is a running joke that runs punchy and very short news articles with lots of photographs, gossip, innuendo and more sports news than international news.

Murdoch has just purchased the Wall Street Journal. This is an undeniably tragic turn of events that should turn everyone's stomach. But the media monopoly is the 800 pound gorilla that the country's leading newspapers don't want to talk about. Today's New York Times provided a news analysis focusing on whether Murdoch's Wall Street Journal will take away the Times' advertisers and compete for influence in its news coverage:

[B]ased on his history, there is little doubt that Mr. Murdoch will directly aim at luring both readers and advertising away from The New York Times and The Financial Times, The Journal’s closest rivals. His strategy will probably include aggressively undercutting advertising and investing heavily in editorial content — particularly in Washington and international news — absorbing losses at first to win the longer-term war.

At its most ambitious, Mr. Murdoch’s vision for Dow Jones would establish The Journal as the rival to The Times in setting the daily news agenda of the country.

It's not just the New York Times that won't talk about the dangers posed by a narrower media monopoly. If you go to Yahoo News and search for "media monopoly," no else seems to focus on it either.

Except for progressive media analysts like Eric Alterman. Maybe there is not enough time for people to absorb the implications of a media aardvark gobbling up another influentual newspaper, but it was my first reaction upon reading about Murdoch's latest purchase. The media monopoly is like global warming: it gets worse and worse and there is no turning back. The corporations that own the newspapers and media outlets are not going to sell them off to family-owned businesses. The best we can do is to contain the damage. That will not happen if people do not see the problem.