Highlights on the Way to a Global Commercial Media Oligopoly: 1990s -1994 Viacom multimedia and industrial corporation takes control of Paramount Communications for US$ 9.6 billion, as well as Blockbuster Entertainment, a huge video store chain, for US$ 8.4. billion. 1995 Entertainment giant Disney buys Capital Cities-ABC for US$ 19 billion. The industrial and broadcasting company Westinghouse Corp. buys out CBS for US$ 5.4 billion. In a US$ 7.2 billion deal, Time Warner acquires Turner Communications, owner of prime cable TV channels CNN, TBS and TNT and a major classic American film library. 1996 Westinghouse/CBS buys Infinity Broadcasting's large group of radio stations. Murdoch and News Corp. acquire ten more TV stations and TV production studios with the US$ 2.5 billion purchase of New World Communications Group. Viacom buys half of UPN-TV network, adding that to its other holdings, which include eleven TV stations, along with MTV, VH-1, and other cable TV channels and Paramount movie studios. 1997 Radio Groups Chancellor Media and Evergreen merge and are linked by ownership with Capstar Broadcasting; they also buy ten radio stations from Viacom. By mid-1997 Chancellor/Capstar controls no fewer than 325 radio stations around the United States. Chancellor/Capstar's controlling ownership group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, buys the seventh largest radio group, SFX, adding another seventy-two radio stations, making a total of nearly four hundred stations controlled by this one source. Westinghouse-CBS buys out American Radio Systems, the fourth largest radio chain in total audience, which gives Westinghouse-CBS over 170 radio stations with a total audience nearly equal to that of the Chancellor/Capstar group. Giant European-based print and electronic publishing and data base corporations Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer merge. 1998 Bertelsmann buys the Random House-Alfred A. Knopf-Crown Publishing group of book publishers from Newhouse/Advance Publications, adding to its Bantam-Doubleday-Dell publishing group and giving Bertelsmann by far the largest English-language publishing operations. 1999 AOL, the worlds leading Internet service provider and Time Warner, the worlds leading classical media company merge in a US$ 243.3 billion deal.

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Digital Commercial Content Starting in the mid 1990s today most traditional media can also be found online. The overwhelming majority of bigger newspapers and periodicals, but also radio and TV stations now complement their classic media formats with digital programming. For the most part they transform existing analogue information in digital form, with some additional features. Especially the big media conglomerates, having realized the economic potential of the Internet, have started to get into the business of digital content. Not surprisingly their engagement in the virtual sphere has not brought much new concerning their programming. They offer entertainment, music, sports and some news channels. One of the reasons for this development might be, that the big commercial media companies are able to re-use already existing programming from their other ventures. Examples are Viacom's MTV Network, which now has a twin online or Time Warner's CNN, which on the Web is called CNN Interactive. Considering business economic factors this move suggests itself as hardly any further resources are needed and the already existing programming can be put in the Internet at little extra cost. Also, regarding the undeniable success of their traditional content in terms of revenue generation the digital reproduction of their classic programming concept seems to be an obvious step.

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The Secret Behind The secret behind all this is the conception that nothing bad could ever be referred to the own nation. All the bad words belong to the enemy, whereas the "we" is the good one, the one who never is the aggressor but always defender, the savior - not only for ones own sake but also for the others, even if they never asked for it, like the German population during World War I and II. The spiritualization of such thinking leads to the point that it gets nearly impossible to believe that this could be un-true, a fake. To imagine injustice committed by the own nation gets more and more difficult, the longer the tactic of this kind of propaganda goes on. U.S.-Americans voluntarily believe in its politics, believing also the USA works as the police of the world, defending the morally good against those who just do not have reached the same level of civilization until today. To keep up this image, the enemy must be portrayed ugly and bad, like in fairy-tales, black-and-white-pictures. Any connection between oneself and the enemy must be erased and made impossible. In the case of Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein this meant to delete the positive contact of the last years from the consciousness of the population. Both had received a high amount of money and material help as long as they kept to the rules of the Western game. Later, when the image of the friend/confederate was destroyed, the contact had to be denied. The media, who had reported that help, no longer seemed to remember and did not write anything about that strange change of mind. And if any did, they were not really listened to, because people tend to hear what they want to hear. And who would want to hear that high amounts of his taxes had formerly gone to "a man" (this personification of the war to one single man is the next disinformation) who now is the demon in one's mind. All of this is no invention of several politicians. Huge think tanks and different governmental organizations are standing behind that. Part of their work is to hide their own work, or to deny it.

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Backbone Networks Backbone networks are central networks usually of very high bandwidth, that is, of very high transmitting capacity, connecting regional networks. The first backbone network was the NSFNet run by the National Science Federation of the United States.

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Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the head of the NSdAP, the National Socialist Workers' Party. Originally coming from Austria, he started his political career in Germany. As the Reichskanzler of Germany he provoked World War II. His hatred against all non-Aryans and people thinking in a different way killed millions of human beings. Disinformation about his personality and an unbelievable machinery of propaganda made an entire people close its eyes to the most cruel crimes on human kind.

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Automation Automation is concerned with the application of machines to tasks once performed by humans or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Although the term mechanization is often used to refer to the simple replacement of human labor by machines, automation generally implies the integration of machines into a self-governing system. Automation has revolutionized those areas in which it has been introduced, and there is scarcely an aspect of modern life that has been unaffected by it. Nearly all industrial installations of automation, and in particular robotics, involve a replacement of human labor by an automated system. Therefore, one of the direct effects of automation in factory operations is the dislocation of human labor from the workplace. The long-term effects of automation on employment and unemployment rates are debatable. Most studies in this area have been controversial and inconclusive. As of the early 1990s, there were fewer than 100,000 robots installed in American factories, compared with a total work force of more than 100 million persons, about 20 million of whom work in factories.

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