The Biggest Big Boys
Viacom, the owner of CBS, is the second-largest media company in the country. Disney, the owner of ABC, is the fourth. NBC (as a division of G.E.) is the fifth.2 [1]
In some ways this should insulate the network news divisions. Their owners are powerful and in theory should be diversified enough that they would have more resources for news and more economies of scale to produce news more efficiently. But size can also mean that news becomes a smaller and potentially less important part of a company's purpose, farther away from its core values, just another contributor to the bottom line.
Dollars in millions
| 2002 Broadcast Revenue | 2002 Cable Revenue | 2002 TV Revenue (Broadcast + Cable) | 2002 Total Revenue | 2002 Broadcast Revenue as % of Total | 2002 Cable Revenue as % of Total | 2002 TV Revenue as % of Total | |
| Viacom | $7,490 | $5,052 | $12,542 | $24,606 | 30% | 21% | 51% |
| Disney | 4,485 | 4,428 | 8,913 | 25,329 | 18% | 18% | 35% |
| NBC (GE) | 6,763 | 627 | 7,390 | 131,698 | 5% | 0.5% | 6% |
Source: AdAge, "100 Leading Media Companies"
Viacom's broadcast television holdings, for instance, generated $7.5 billion in revenue for 2002. As hefty as that sum might sound, it was not even a third of the company's $24.6 billion in revenues overall. Disney took in $4.5 billion in broadcast revenue in 2002. That was not even a fifth of the company's total of $25 billion. And NBC's $6.7 billion in broadcast revenue was barely 5 percent of General Electric's $132 billion.3 [2]