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MediaChannel's official birth in February came just after a
bombshell media development, the announcement of the proposed merger of
two of the world's biggest media corporations: AOL, whose services are
bought by one out of five U.S. Internet subscribers and which is
expanding worldwide, and Time Warner, owner of numerous magazines, film
and TV outlets. Most media coverage of the proposed $165 billion merger
spoke in glowing terms of its business possibilities, and of the
symbolic importance of a new-media giant, AOL, now being rich enough to
buy an old-media company, Time Warner, whose roots are in the Hollywood
of the 1920's.
To celebrate our official launch, MediaChannel invited six media
critics to discuss the AOL-Time Warner megamerger and its implications
for critical journalism and democratic media at a public symposium. The
panel (excerpts from which appear below) took place in New York City, at the Earthpledge
Foundation's Carriage House, on February 3.
Participants included: Jonathan Alter, media critic for Newsweek and
NBC; Ken Auletta, New Yorker media critic and author of "Three
Blind Mice: How The TV Networks Lost Their Way" and "The
Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway"; Farai
Chideya, author of "Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural
Misinformation About African-Americans" and a former correspondent with
MTV News and ABC, now the host of "Pure Oxygen" on the women's cable network, Oxygen; Jay
Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU and author of "What Are
Journalists For?"; Christopher Byron, formerly with Time magazine
and now a commentator for MSNBC and "Back of the Envelope" columnist for
The New York Observer; and Michael Wolff, media columnist for New York
magazine and author of "Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush
Years on the Internet." MediaChannel Senior Editor Larry Bensky
moderated.
MediaChannel panel at the Earthpledge Foundation's Carriage House, Manhattan, February 3.
Larry Bensky: I'd like to try to set the opening parameters of our
discussion by citing two recent articles about the proposed AOL-Time
Warner merger. One is an article in The Industry Standard by their New
York correspondent, Jim Ledbetter, who says that the deal "is an
indication that the Internet business [which] matured originally apart
from the world of big traditional media functioned in some important
ways as its alternative. But that era is over in this country."
The other is from a commentary in U.S. News and World Report, which
quotes AOL's Steve Case as saying "content is secondary, community
is the core product." I would ask our panelists: Is it indeed true that
the Internet is finished as an alternative? And what kind of
"community" are we now headed for, under the AOLs and Time
Warners of the world?
Michael Wolff: I think the answer to your question is that all things
get to co-exist together, that Steve Case and Gerry Levin aren't going
to run the world, and the Internet isn't going to go away. Or, let's put
it this way: At the same time they're running their world, the
Internet continues to do what the Internet does. I don't see that we're
at any end point right now. We're involved in a transformation that
continues, well, for at least the next few years.
Ken Auletta: It should cause concern; size should always concern us,
and what the intention of that size is should concern us. That is to say
that people [who say that] the AOL-Time Warner merger will inevitably
create this giant company where journalism becomes a smaller and smaller
part—people at the top of these institutions tend to quantify results. And people like (MediaChannel's executive editor) Danny
Schechter tend to qualify results. What is important to him and
other journalists is not necessarily important to Steve Case, who
doesn't understand it. And that's not an insult to him. It's just the
way the world is, as Walter Cronkite says.
I think when you look at the Time Warner deal you'd say yes, it is
driven in part by people who think they're gonna control the world, and
are afraid they're gonna get taken over by the ants, by the Internet and
other startups and by technology and things they can't anticipate. So I
think two models are vying...and it's too early to tell which is gonna
win. On one hand, you've got giant companies that are trying to get
larger and larger and are getting larger and larger, and these do
create some worrisome questions for journalists. On the other hand, you
have the ability through technology and the Internet and self-publishing
and online newspapers and magazines throughout the world to really get
rid of the middleman, [the] power of that giant company. So, I think two
things are happening and it's unclear what the result will be.
Christopher Byron: I think the real thing that you're getting at with
your question is really, what is Wall Street itself all about and the
dot.com IPO mania that we've now seen going on for three years. It's
kind of a bubble phase of this thing, and it's no different from what
happened in the conglomerate merger of the '60s... What I believe drove the
AOL-Time Warner deal was a desire on the part of the chairman of Time
Warner to get the stock price up, and he has succeeded in that to the
same degree that Steve Case has essentially given him that elbow room by
bringing his own stock price down. This is not a struggle about new
media and old media, community, and all the rest of it. It's essentially
a struggle about how do I get the stock price up, how do I get money.
That's what Wall Street is essentially all about: the relentless hunt
for money.
Farai Chideya: I think what you've seen over the past few years is
that the people who provide content have merged with the people who
provide access. Basically, they own everything. They own the means of
production, the things that are being produced — you know, they kind of
have everything in a headlock...[and] we don't have the regulatory
mechanisms to deal with this.
Jonathan Alter: I found the merger kind of creepy, but I'm not as
fearful as my friend Jim Ledbetter. I just think he's wrong in saying
the Internet is over as an alternative [medium]. I reject the notion
that somehow we are worse off in terms of diversity [than] when Walter
Cronkite was king of the world. I mean, in those days you had three TV
networks, first 15 minutes and then 30 minutes a night of news. [Now]
technology is much, much more friendly to letting a million flowers
bloom. And the idea that because one company swallows the other that
somehow people are not going to be able to create their own Web sites I
think is ridiculous. Because the power of the Internet is such that it
simply won't be able to be controlled by anybody, and that's why it's
such a wonderful, exciting, revolutionary force in American life.
Jay Rosen: I like to think about what would be a good outcome for a
deal like this for the public-service journalism that is done by a
company like this, and what would be a good outcome...for people who care
about accountability under conditions like this. About six weeks ago,
The Los Angeles Times had a situation in which they had to re-build
their credibility (around the Staples Arena profit-sharing scandal).
Here was an organization using journalism to rebuild its credibility,
through a 20,000-word article showing the agony of the organization. And
if you can re-build your credibility, why not pre-build
your credibility. You would ask Time Warner to undertake a very critical
examination of what's going to happen to the public service dimension of
the new company itself, and make that examination a Time-Life product. I
would think that would be a very interesting thing to do.
Alter: But all you'd get if you undertook what you're talking about
is a bunch of pious statements from a bunch of corporate executives
saying that they will maintain standards. It's later on that the really
dangerous part of all this...takes place. There are stories that we won't
get, when...somebody doesn't go out and do some investigative work that
they might have undertaken otherwise. And it's a very subtle and
insidious kind of self-censorship, and very hard — especially before the
merger has been completed — to anticipate.
Chideya: It's interesting because I think that journalism is already
undergoing a few different crises, which all the money in the world has
not seemed to solve. A couple of notable ones concern race and youth.
Right now, there's a freefall in youth readership. At one point between
'94 and '98, the number of young people who watch network news dropped
by 30 or 40 percent, and it was the same for newspapers. When it comes
to African-Americans, I've looked at lots of different studies. There's
another one out recently that tracked crime coverage and showed that
around 67 percent of criminals on nightly news are black despite the
fact that about a third of the criminal population in the [United
States] is black. I think that one thing that has been totally left
behind — and it is not a result of the whole Time Warner merger — but one
thing that has been left behind in this whole debate is [why] a media
that is flush and ripe with money still manages to do news that is
consistently pejorative and simply non-factual about African-Americans
and other minorities. Every once in a while you get a cover [story]
about "Latinos: The New Minority — Come Eat Your Enchiladas" and
that is simply not good news coverage.
Byron: Listening to this, I wonder what the real threat is here. If
there is something to be worried about in all this, it's the capacity of
a company of the AOL-Time Warner size, with the financial resources that
are available to it, to drown out the other voices on the Web and to
establish a defining national voice with high quality production values
that grab millions of eyeballs and shape everybody's thinking on an
issue, so that large numbers of dissident voices are not heard, they're
marginalized and pushed to the fringe. To the degree that this merger
represents a threat to democracy, that is the threat, not that it
represents some overt censorship or strangulation of what we have to
say.
Wolff: In essence, Time Warner is not a news company. It derives a
very small portion of its overall income from the news business. It's
not in the news business. It's functionally an entertainment
company.
You don't consider Time magazine a newsmagazine? What about
CNN?
Wolff: I think one of the things you've seen about CNN since it was
absorbed by Time Warner, at least in my opinion, is that it has become a
less interesting product. And it is facing enormous competition in the
marketplace because of that. And I think there is a way that you can
begin to see this, [where] Time Warner says "that is fundamentally
not what we do any more. We are an entertainment company, and a pipes
company."
Rosen: As I understand the foundation of the Media Channel, the
concern is the kinds of voices that are powerful public voices. What are
those voices saying to us, what values are incorporated? [...] Based on
what theory of public service does this deal make any sense? What sort
of public service does [AOL-Time Warner] continue to provide? How much
of its mission does it see as public service, or simply as business?
Because if it still has this mythical claim on the values of news, we
need to know what values they're pursing.
Unidentified audience participant: You've been talking a lot about
media but you haven't talked about markets. The question, of course, is
whether we are going to talk about media.org, media.gov, or media.com.
What has happened since World War II is that [we've moved] from a
media-dot-civil society into a media.com, where media are just another
form of commerce. And the real issue is what happens when you
subordinate media to commerce. We have forgotten that back in the 70's,
when cable was introduced, we were all told there was a great new
democratic potential in cable. It was called public access. [...] There
would be a public-access channel that would have diversity and civic and
cultural things. Does anyone watch public access? Does any cable company
have any public access in meaningful form any more? Of course not,
because [cable] became another media.com. [...] Clearly, the big boys are
going to be out to get control because that's how they make the
money.
Bensky: Here's a fact from my friend Norman Solomon. In 1995, the
major newspapers referred to the "information superhighway" in
4500 stories and "e-commerce" only 950 times. In 1999, the
"superhighway" mentions were down to 842...and e-commerce was
mentioned 20,600 times.
Alter: I agree that the Internet is becoming "b-to-b" — business to
business transactions. But with modern graphic capability and good Web
design, you can get your Web design as good as anything that is going to
be churned out by these bureaucrats at Time Warner. So, these
voices...yes, they will be crowded out in terms of the megaphone, which is
much larger for the big corporations. But quality has more of a chance,
a fighting chance of getting an audience. There is something more
fundamentally democratic about cable television.
Chideya: But think about this: With broadband, you will essentially
have to create television and radio style programming, so the lower
barrier to entry will no longer be low and you will have to do TV-style
programming, which will be prohibitive. What I think is going to happen
is that, with companies like AOL, you're certainly not going to get a
lack of ability for people to create content on the Web. [...] What you're
going to get are portals determining who gets visibility.
Wolff: The crisis facing the media business today is actually the
opposite of the one that seems to be the concern here, which is not a
centralizing of audiences, of limiting voices, but exactly the opposite.
The media business is in crisis — and it's the reason that AOL and Time
Warner merge — because audiences are fracturing. They're fracturing
because there are just so many more places to go, so much information.
That's not to say that there aren't still controlling blocks for some of
this information, but where before they controlled as networks 95
percent of the audience, now they are down to 48 percent. I think that
addresses the public interest question. The public interest was an
important concern when an essential monopoly existed. That monopoly has
broken down.
Byron: But with a multiplicity of voices, it does you no good if no
one hears you but your next-door neighbor. You have a large pool of
money — an enormous pool of money, huge amounts, billions of dollars — in
the hands of a relatively small amount of people who are spending nearly
all of it on two things only: servers and ads. That money...creates an
audience. [...] [It] makes a joke of the notion that I can create a Web
site and I'm equal with AOL. It's absurd.
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