Introduction
This study will examine news coverage of The Walt Disney Co., Apple Inc., and six other major entertainment and technology employers in California. This is a worthy topic of study because these large corporations—especially Disney and Apple—are economic and cultural forces, globally and within California’s two largest population centers. These companies, particularly Disney and Apple, have strong business connections and operate in a media and business environment that has been changed by new technologies such as the Internet.
In 2006, Disney purchased Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion (Barnes, 2008b). The acquisition combined two pioneering forces in the film animation industry. It also made Apple Chief Executive Officer and Pixar Chairman Steve Jobs—who had purchased Pixar in 1986 from Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas—a member of Disney’s board of directors and the Southern California media conglomerate’s largest individual shareholder (Barnes, 2008b; Catmull, 2008; Telotte, 2008).
The entertainment industry is the largest employer in Southern California, and the technology industry is the largest employer in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, which stretches from San Jose, the largest city in the region, north to San Francisco. Economists and geographers suggest such regional industrial agglomerations, also known as business clusters, are a powerful form of organization for the deployment of capital and labor. This study will examine the framing of news coverage of large corporations in the Hollywood and Silicon Valley business clusters, both by large newspapers within those regions and by national publications.