It’s important to know that NBC is owned by General Electric (which means that interviews with people who live near a nuclear plant undoubtedly would be … but then again, such a story wouldn’t even occur to anyone), that CBS is owned by Westinghouse, and ABC by Disney, that TF1 belongs to Bouygues, and that these facts lead to consequences through a whole series of mediations. It is obvious that the government won’t do certain things to Bouygues, knowing that Bouygues is behind TF1. These factors, which are so crude that they are obvious to even the most simple-minded critique, hide other things, all the anonymous and invisible mechanisms through which the many kinds of censorship operate to make television such a formidable instrument for maintaining the symbolic order.
Pierre Bourdieu, “On Television”
read here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bourdieu-television.html