Watch the Best Documentaries about Big Media, Media Consolidation, and the Corporate Influence on News

Big Media is a nickname for all of the major mainstream media conglomerates, which collectively own 90% of all the media we read, see and hear in the United States.

The biggest six include General Electric, Disney, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS. Collectively, they have consolidated ownership across every major medium, including TV, radio, cable, book publishing, magazines, newspapers, movie studios, and various other entertainment mediums.

Although the internet remains relatively free, they have been fighting vigorously to control and restrict the internet as well through legislation such as PIPA and SOPA.

They are driven primarily by the profit incentive, rather than to inform or challenge power, and fall victim to the major editorial filters outlined in Noam Chomsky's The Propaganda Model of News. While this wall of films focuses mainly on the U.S., most countries face the same growing trend of media concentration and suffer from a lack of independent voices who have the financial freedom to speak truth to power.

If you're wondering where to start, our top picks include Rich Media, Poor Democracy (2003), The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News (1997),  Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class (2005), and Orwell Rolls In His Grave (2003).

Here at Films For Action, we believe the problems of the media represent the number 1 bottleneck impeding the progress of every other important issue. By creating our own independent media networks, we'll be able to break big media's near monopoly on the flow of information and challenge the dominant storytellers and producers of meaning in our culture. We'll create a democratic media that tells our stories and represents the full diversity of society, not just the interests of shareholders and advertisers.

Film offers us a powerful tool to shift awareness and inspire action. It offers a method to break our dependence on the mainstream media and become the media ourselves. We don't need to wait for anyone or anything.
 

Just imagine what could become possible if an entire city had seen just one of the documentaries above. Just imagine what would be possible if everyone in the country was aware of how unhealthy the mainstream media was for our future and started turning to independent sources in droves.

Creating a better world really does start with an informed citizenry, and there's lots of subject matter to cover. 

From all the documentaries above, it's evident that our society needs a new story to belong to. The old story of empire and dominion over the earth has to be looked at in the full light of day - all of our ambient cultural stories and values that we take for granted and which remain invisible must become visible.

But most of all, we need to see the promise of the alternatives - we need to be able to imagine new exciting ways that people could live, better than anything that the old paradigm could ever dream of providing.

And all of this knowledge and introspection, dreaming, questioning, and discovery is essential for a cultural transformation that addresses root causes. This knowledge is vitally necessary. Taken together, this knowledge, which is documented throughout the 500+ documentaries on the Films For Action website, will lay the foundation on which the next paradigm will be built, post empire.

So take this library of films and use it. Host film screenings, share these films with friends, buy and give copies to your elected officials and school faculty. Get this information out in to your community and you will be laying the foundation for a local movement for mass societal, environmental and economic change.

Join us.

More Walls of Awesome (filtered by subject)
 

Activism - Animal Rights - Big Ideas - Big Media - Climate Change - Corporations

Community - Consumerism - Culture - Drug Prohibition - Education - Everything 

Food - Sustainability - Terrorism? - War & Peace