entertainment weekly via getty images

Our ol’ pal, Posies singer-songwriter Ken Stringfellow, is quoted at the East Portland Blog as saying the Madonna/M.I.A. halftime show at Super Bowl LSMFT was all OK but doesn’t really signify “empowering women.”

That sort of “feminist victory,” Stringfellow claims, will only occur when “50 percent of the media companies are owned by women.”

“Ownership,” of course, is a slippery thing with NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies.

Such companies could easily be more than 50 percent “owned” by women. Overall, a sizable majority of all corporate stock shares officially are.

But this “ownership” is often filtered through pension systems, trusts, mutual funds, broker-managed accounts, and other schemes that don’t infer practical control.

Of the major media companies operating in the U.S. today, only a few have any significant degree of individual or family ownership. Among them:

• Viacom (Paramount, et al.) and CBS, now separately managed but both controlled by movie-theater mogul Sumner Redstone and family;
• Warner Music Group, now controlled by Russian-born chemical titan Len Blavatnik;
• Hearst Corp. (Cosmopolitan, A&E, et al.), wholly owned by that family’s fourth- and fifth-generation members;
• Advance Publications (The New Yorker, The Oregonian, Puget Sound Business Journal, et al.), owned by the S.I. Newhouse family;
• and, of course, News Corp. (Fox, et al.), controlled by the Rupert Murdoch clan.

Redstone’s and Murdoch’s daughters have taken major roles within their respective aging dads’ companies, and may take greater roles in the future.

But they’ve shown every sign of supporting regular showbiz-content gender roles, including the roles Stringfellow derides as “T&A” and “soft porn.”

I, and I suspect many of you, wouldn’t count that as a “feminist victory.”