This first great media mega-merger of the new millennium came as a major shock to all—including the Time Warner journalists—and yet it really shouldn't have. First of all, the Giant Few that rule the media have all been buying heavily into cyber-space for quite some time. (Just to name a few: Disney owns Infoseek, and Viacom/CBS, once approved, will own about a half-billion dollars worth of prime Web sites.) The marriage of the world's biggest Internet company and the world's biggest media corporation represents no large departure from the norm. Rather, it is but the most humongous formal union of the powers of "old media" and "new media"—and there are surely more to come.
This marriage shouldn't really come as a surprise because the groundwork for it was laid hastily by the U.S. Congress and White House (working closely with the major media corporations' CEOs) four years ago, with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This was the law that liberalized the rules governing how just how big a media company can be. Although promoted in the name of "competition" (a public claim that must have had a lot of politicians snickering up their sleeves), the Telecom Bill was meant to stifle competition, by enabling the assemblage of that mammoth culture trust which runs the show today.
(It was also this law that mandated the outright giveaway of the digital TV spectrum to the usual enormous suspects—a vast and crucial piece of public property, worth, by conservative estimate, some $70 billion, summarily donated to the likes of Murdoch, Disney and GE, for no money at all. This particular plum was handed to the major owners of TV stations, not to cable giants like Time Warner; but it's principle that's pertinent here; and, in any case, there is no reason to assume that AOL Time Warner will not end up merging with some other company that does own lots and lots of TV stations....)
And now we have the prospect of AOL Time Warner blitzing all of us—day in, day out, right where we live—with endless, dazzling come-ons for Time Warner's properties. That's all this is about: expanding AOL's consumer base, and smacking it eternally, ingeniously, and inescapably with hours and days and weeks of ultra-clever cyber-advertising for Time Warner's TV programs, movies, CDs, books and theme parks.
The whole thing, if I may speak bluntly, stinks—the anti-democratic deal rammed through by Congress and the White house, the hyper-commercialization of the Internet, this particular monopolistic merger, and the other, similar mergers that gave rise to AOL Time Warner's few huge rivals/partners. And there's another serious problem here, in a way worse still than all the rest: the concomitant decline—or maybe "disappearance" is a better word—of genuine journalism. For an unfettered journalism, operating in the interest of the people, would examine, critically, just how the Telecom Bill was passed and what it really signified, the gross mallification of the Net, and all of those monopolistic couplings. But such journalism is no longer there within the
mainstream—where most Americans might learn from it, and thereby come to know enough to try to change the situation.
Things do look grim; but there is also hope—in the American people's evident and growing distaste for what the media now gives us. Equally important, there's also promise in the growing chagrin of journalists, who, more and more, see clearly that these mega-mergers are a real bad thing for them, and for the craft that they spent long years studying—a craft that has now been coarsened almost beyond recognition by the pressures of the bottom line.
In giving interviews all day yesterday, to print, radio and TV journalists alike, I was struck, and heartened, by the fact that all of them could see at once that there is nothing in this latest merger that's worth celebrating. This marks a change from just a couple of years ago, when many journalists would bridle at the claim that they could be deterred
or thwarted by the business side of their respective companies. This new awareness, and this growing dissatisfaction, is exactly what could inspire a revolution—and a revolution is exactly what we need.
- Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University, where he directs the Project on Media Ownership.
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