[Corporations] FW: The Five Sisters

[Mike Spears]

The Five Sisters
If one huge corporation controlled both the production and the dissemination
of most of our news and entertainment, couldn't it rule the world?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/opinion/16SAFI.html
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February 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST 

The Five Sisters
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON ‹ If one huge corporation controlled both the production and the
dissemination of most of our news and entertainment, couldn't it rule the
world?

Can't happen here, you say; America is the land of competition that
generates new technology to ensure a diversity of voices. But consider how a
supine Congress and a feckless majority of the Federal Communications
Commission have been failing to protect our access to a variety of news,
views and entertainment.

The media giant known as Viacom-CBS-MTV just showed us how it controls both
content and communication of the sexiest Super Bowl. The five other big
sisters that now bestride the world are (1)
Murdoch-FoxTV-HarperCollins-WeeklyStandard-NewYorkPost-LondonTimes-DirecTV;
(2) G.E.-NBC-Universal-Vivendi; (3) Time-Warner-CNN-AOL; (4)
Disney-ABC-ESPN; and (5) the biggest cable company, Comcast.

As predicted here in an "Office Pool" over two years ago, Comcast has just
bid to take over Disney (Ed Bleier, then of Warner Bros., was my prescient
source). If the $50 billion deal is successful, the six giants would shrink
to five, with Disney-Comcast becoming the biggest.

Would Rupert Murdoch stand for being merely No. 2? Not on your life. He
would take over a competitor, perhaps the Time-Warner-CNN-AOL combine,
making him biggest again. Meanwhile, cash-rich Microsoft ‹ which already
owns 7 percent of Comcast and is a partner of G.E.'s MSNBC ‹ would swallow
both Disney-ABC and G.E.-NBC. Then there would be three, on the way to one.

You say the U.S. government would never allow that? The Horatius
lollygagging at the bridge is the F.C.C.'s Michael Powell, who never met a
merger he didn't like. Cowering next to him is General Roundheels at the
Bush Justice Department's Pro-Trust Division, which last year waved through
Murdoch's takeover of DirecTV. (Joel Klein, Last of the Trustbusters, now
teaches school in New York.)

But what of the Senate, guardian of free speech? There was Powell last week
before Chairman John McCain's Commerce Committee, currying favor with
cultural conservatives by pretending to be outraged over Janet Jackson's
"costume reveal." The F.C.C. chairman, looking stern, pledged "ruthless and
rigorous scrutiny" of any Comcast bid to merge Disney-ABC-ESPN into a huge
DisCast. Media giants ‹ always willing to agree to cosmetic "restrictions"
on their way to amalgamation ‹ chuckled at the notion of a "ruthless Mike."

McCain's plaintive question to Powell ‹ "Where will it all end?" ‹ is too
little, too late. This senatorial apostle of deregulation, who last week
called the world's attention to the media concentration that helps subvert
democracy in Russia, has been blind to the danger of headlong concentration
of media power in America.

The benumbing euphemism for the newly permitted top-to-bottom information
and entertainment control is "vertical integration." In Philadelphia,
Comcast not only owns the hometown basketball team, but owns its stadium,
owns the cable sports channel televising the games as well as owning the
line that brings the signal into Philadelphians' houses. Soon: ESPN, too. Go
compete against, or argue with, that head-to-toe control ‹ and then apply
that chilling form of integration to cultural events and ultimately to news
coverage. 

The reason given by giants to merge with other giants is to compete more
efficiently with other enlarging conglomerates. The growing danger, however,
is that media giants are becoming fewer as they get bigger. The assurance
given is "look at those independent Internet Web sites that compete with us"
‹ but all the largest Web sites are owned by the giants.

How are the media covering their contraction? (I still construe the word
"media" as plural in hopes that McCain will get off his duff and Bush will
awaken.) Much of the coverage is "gee-whiz, which personality will be top
dog, which investors will profit and which giant will go bust?"

But the message in this latest potential merger is not about a clash of
media megalomaniacs, nor about a conspiracy driven by "special interests."
The issue is this: As technology changes, how do we better protect the
competition that keeps us free and different?

You don't have to be a populist to want to stop this rush by ever-fewer
entities to dominate both the content and the conduit of what we see and
hear and write and say. 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company 


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