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 US 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-Weekly Standard-New York Post-London Times-DirecTV; (2) GE-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 US$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 GE's MSNBC -- would swallow both Disney-ABC and GE-NBC. Then there would be three, on the way to one.
You say the US government would never allow that? The Horatius lollygagging at the bridge is the FCC's Chairman Michael Powell, who never met a merger he didn't like. Cowering next to him is General Roundheels at President George W. Bush's 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 Senator John McCain's Commerce Committee, currying favor with cultural conservatives by pretending to be outraged over Janet Jackson's "costume reveal." The FCC 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.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth