OPPapers.com

Media Ownership

What is media ownership? What are the pros and cons of media ownership? What are the effects of media ownership? These are just some of the questions I hope to answer by taking a closer look at this issue. We’ll begin by looking at a popular animated television show, Family Guy.
Family Guy started as merely a doodle in Seth MacFarlane’s notebook while still a student at The Rhode Island School of Design. In the 1990’s Seth created a short entitled “The Life of Larry” which after being hired at Hannah-Barbara Cartoons, Inc. he was given the opportunity to make a sequel to. This sequel, entitled “Larry and Steve” was shown on Cartoon Network as part of a program called The What A Cartoon Show. FOX Broadcasting Company executives saw both shorts and gave Seth an opportunity to develop a show based on those characters. What followed, while closely paralleling Larry and Steve, grew into Family Guy. Seth MacFarlane formed Fuzzy Door Productions to handle work on Family Guy. Fuzzy Door Productions was so named because of the fake, leopard printed fur covering the door of the house Seth lived in while he was a student in college. Fuzzy Door also handles work for the American Dad! Series, the Family Guy movie (Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story), and Blue Harvest (the Family Guy Star Wars parody). Fox canceled Family Guy once in 2000, and again in 2002, but due to high sales of Family Guy DVDs, Family Guy was brought back and Fuzzy Door Productions has been contracted to produce new episodes until 2012.
We would be remiss in speaking about Family Guy without learning something about its host company, Fox Broadcasting Network. Fox Broadcasting Network, or as it is more commonly referred to as Fox, started in March of 1985 with its parent company’s (News Corporation) $250 million purchase of 50% of TCF Holdings. In may of that year, News Corporation paid 1.55 billion to acquire 6 independent television stations from a company called Metromedia. In...