The old adage “whoever controls the media, controls the mind” rings as true today as it ever has, and a surprisingly low number of individuals own or have major stakes in many of the world's leading newspapers, magazines, websites, TV and radio stations, movie studios, book and publishers. We reveal the world's most powerful media moguls and exactly what they hold sway over.

The so-called “Barclay Brothers”, Sir David Barclay and Sir Frederick Barclay are among the UK's foremost media tycoons. Their bulging portfolio includes Press Holdings, which owns the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, as well as The Spectator and Apollo art magazine. The identical twins have a number of other impressive assets too...

Their interests extend beyond newspapers and include London's Ritz Hotel, online retail business Shop Direct and delivery firm Yodel. Having courted controversy for their creative tax arrangements, the discreet pair are camera-shy and reclusive. They split their time between tax-free Monaco and the Channel Island of Brecqhou.

Italy's Silvio Berlusconi has come a long way from his first job of selling vacuum cleaners. After taking a degree in law, he began his formal career in construction but entered the world of media in 1973 when he launched a local cable-TV channel: Telemilano. He soon rose to become the country's most powerful mass communications tycoon, as his company grew to become Mediaset. Italy's prime minister during three terms in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, Berlusconi holds a controlling stake in Fininvest, the holiding company for Mediaset, and the buck stops with him. 

The company recently sold its financial data business to Blackstone for $17 billion (£13.4bn) but has held on to its newswire division. Other assets that fall under Thomson Reuters' wing include Toronto-based newspaper The Globe and Mail and a number of book publishing, telecoms, legal and science concerns.

Usmanov, who has hit the headlines in the West for having had a large interest in Arsenal football team, co-owns Mail.Ru, Russia's largest internet company. The firm controls the country's three leading social media sites, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir. Usmanov also owns newspaper publisher Kommersant and part-owns MegaFon, the second-biggest mobile phone operator in Russia. Usmanov was also an early investor in American social media site, Facebook.

The descendants of Matsutaro Shoriki (pictured), the man referred to as “Japan's Citizen Kane”, own the Yomirui Group, the Asian country's largest media conglomerate. The group controls Yomiuri Shimbun, the daily newspaper with the largest circulation in the world.

The group also owns the Nippon TV network, the Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation and Chuokoron-Shinsha, which is a major publisher of novels, manga, magazines. Other notable assets range from the Yomiuri Giants pro baseball team to the Yomiuriland theme park in Tokyo.

Gordon has control over an impressive number of assets. They include Australia's WIN TV channels and radio stations, content producer Crawford Productions, the Nine Network TV stations, various newspapers from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to the Brisbane Times, consumer magazines, websites, and even a streaming service.

Via her production company Harpo, Winfrey, who is worth $2.6 billion (£2.1bn), has founded a movie studio and media network, and in 2011 the mega-influential TV star launched The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), which she shares with Discovery Inc. Harpo also publishes the O, The Oprah Magazine in partnership with Hearst.

English aristocrat Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, is the chairman and controlling shareholder of British media company The Daily Mail & General Trust. The firm has its fingers in many pies and owns the UK's Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Metro newspapers along with MailOnline, the most visited English-language newspaper website in the world. 

The group comprises Brazil's leading broadcaster Rede Globo, Globosat, which is the number one pay TV provider in the country, websites including news portal G1, movie studio Globo Filmes, record company Som Livre, and Brazil's leading newspaper O Globo.

As well as streaming bought-in content, Netflix has become one of the world's leading content producers, having ploughed billions of dollars into original programming. The company turned over $15.8 billion (£12.5bn) last year. As might be expected, Hastings has amassed a sizeable fortune off the back of Netflix's success. His net worth right now amounts to $3.9 billion (£3.1bn).

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Properties of the group include book publishers Hachette, Orion and Octopus, magazine and newspaper company Hachette Filipacchi, which owns a multitude of well-known titles from Paris Match Magazine to newspaper Nice-Matin, TV channels Gulli and MCM, radio stations like Virgin and Europe 1, and several non-media entities such as duty-free shop chain Aelia.

Michael Bloomberg founded his eponymous media, financial services and software firm in 1981. Now a major philanthropist who has given away $8 billion (£6.2bn) to date, the magnate, who is worth $56.2 billion (£44.7bn), was mayor of New York for three terms. Bloomberg owns a chunky 88% of his namesake company.

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Bloomberg's assets include its flagship Bloomberg Terminal financial software system, the Bloomberg News wire service, Bloomberg Television, which broadcasts worldwide, along with a number of websites, magazines such as Bloomberg Businessweek, newsletters and the multiplatform Bloomberg Politics.

The “Cable Cowboy” as he is nicknamed, Malone, who is worth $7.1 billion (£5.6bn), is the controlling shareholder of Liberty Media, which started as a spin-off of TCI, as well as Liberty Global and Qurate Retail Group. The companies' assets include Sirius XM Satellite Radio, the Formula One Group, QVC, Virgin Media, and major interests in Discovery Inc. the UK's ITV channel and Lionsgate. Not only that but Malone is the biggest landowner in the US, owning over 2.2 million acres across America.

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The group has an abundance of media assets. They include newspapers such as the San Francisco Chronicle, magazines from Elle and Harper's Bazaar to Esquire, numerous radio and ABC-affiliated TV stations, cable channels, business media such as Fitch Ratings and websites like iVillage, Medscape and Digital Spy.

The many assets of the humongous conglomerate include Comcast TV, NBC Universal, which owns everything from E! and Bravo to the NBC Sports Networks, DreamWorks Animations, the studio behind Shrek and Kung Fu Panda, Xfinity cable TV, internet and telephone services, and Europe's Sky group, which was acquired last year from Rupert Murdoch's 21^st Century Fox.

Though much of his companies' operations are centred in Latin America, Slim's media empire extends to the USA – the tycoon owns 17% of The New York Times newspaper. Slim also has a multitude of interests in property, manufacturing, retail and construction, hence his stupendous wealth.

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Together with the heirs of his late brother Si, Donald Newhouse (pictured here with Anna Wintour) owns Advance Publications, the firm established by the siblings' father Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. in 1922. The media company is the parent of Condé Nast, which publishes the Vogue print magazines and websites, as well as the likes of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Glamour.

Advance Publications also owns a chain of newspapers and business journals in the US. From local papers such as New Jersey's The Star-Ledger and Oregon's The Oregonian to a large stake in Discovery Inc., the parent firm of the Discovery Channel and Food Network. The group is also a major shareholder in social news website Reddit. Needless to say, Newhouse is a very rich man indeed – his current net worth stands at $12.9 billion (£10.3bn).

The CEO of The Walt Disney Company since 2005, multimillionaire US executive Bob Iger has also become the group's number one individual shareholder. Disney has mushroomed into a vast conglomerate under Iger's leadership, acquiring Marvel Entertainment, Lucasfilm and most recently, the lion's share of 21st Century Fox.

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The new assets have added to existing flagships such as the Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar movie studios, the group's much-loved theme parks and resorts around the world, and TV channels like ABC and National Geographic. Disney also has major stakes in the Endemol Shine Group, ESPN, ViceMedia, Lifetime and the History network.

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The richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, who is currently worth a staggering $159.2 billion (£126.5bn), owns a 16% stake in Amazon, the e-commerce and cloud computing giant he started in his garage in 1994. Bezos has become quite the media mogul. As well as controlling Amazon Music, Audible and Prime Video, he is the owner of The Washington Post. The unstoppable entrepreneur snapped up the venerable publication in 2013. 

Amazon has also emerged as a major player in the online advertising market and has a super-popular streaming service, Amazon Prime Video, a publishing business, as well as a movie and TV studio, which has produced a plethora of award-winning content, from top-grossing films like Manchester by the Sea to hit shows including The Man in the High Castle and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Multimillionaire Randall Stephenson is the CEO of America's AT&T and its leading individual shareholder. The world's largest telecoms company, AT&T has also morphed into the biggest media and entertainment conglomerate globally following its $100 billion (£78.5bn) acquisition of WarnerMedia this year. 

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WarnerMedia has a bewildering array of assets. It principal properties include HBO and CNN Worldwide, and Warner Bros., which owns Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Films, New Line Cinema, and others. Not only that but the media giant also owns Warner Bros. Television, the parent of TMZ, The Cartoon Network and numerous other TV, cable network, video game and publishing operations.

Though Mark Zuckerberg is constantly at pains to insist that Facebook is a technology rather than a media company, there's no denying the social network he founded in 2004 has a massive influence on the world's media landscape. Facebook has even started to stream original content through Facebook Watch, a video streaming service hosted and partly funded by the social network. 

As well as its Facebook Watch video-on-demand service, Facebook-owned Instagram has worked with external organisations like MTV and Meredith to create content for the standalone vertical video app IGTV. From where we're standing, Zuckerberg, who is worth $73.2 billion (£58.2bn), is most definitely a media mogul.

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Australian-born tycoon Rupert Murdoch inherited several newspapers Down Under in the 1950s, and has gone on to build an incredibly formidable media empire that spans the globe. It consists of NewsCorp, which owns a string of mainly right-leaning newspapers including Britain's The Sun and The Times, and America's New York Post, as well as book publisher Harper Collins and Dow Jones & Company, the firm that produces The Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch, who is currently worth $21.7 billion (£17.2bn), also owns Fox Corp. The company was spun off earlier this year from media colossus 21st Century Fox following the sale of the bulk of its assets, including the famous movie studio, to Disney for $71.3 billion (£56.2bn). Fox Corp has retained control of the conservative news network Fox News, Fox Sports and the Fox Broadcasting channels.

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