The Big Media Game Has Fewer and Fewer Players.

• Author: McCHESNEY, ROBERT W.
• Position: Impact of consolidation on journalistic integrity

When Viacom announced its offer to gobble up CBS for W$37 billion in September, it capped off a decade of unprecedented deal-making and concentration in the media industries. The new Viacom would be one of only nine massive conglomerates--all of which took their present shape in the last fifteen years--that dominate the U.S. media landscape.

These giants--Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Viacom, Sony, Seagram, AT&T/Liberty Media, Bertelsmann, and GE--to a large extent furnish your TV programs, movies, videos, radio shows, music, books, and other recreational activities.

They do a superb job of maximizing profit for their shareholders but a dreadful job of providing the basis for a healthy democracy. Their entertainment fare is tailored to the needs of Madison Avenue; their journalism to the needs of the wealthy and powerful.

By any known standard of liberal democracy, such a concentration of media power in a few self-interested firms run by some of the wealthiest people in the world poses an immediate and growing threat to our republic. As James Madison put it in 1822, "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."

When the Viacom/CBS deal was announced, Time and Newsweek lavished attention on the personalities of Viacom's Summer Redstone and CBS's Mel Karmazin. To the extent that there was analysis, it centered on how the deal would affect Viacom's profits and the strategies of its main competitors.

The Washington Post's "Outlook" section featured a lead story entitled, "Clap If You Love Mega-TV! Without the conglomerates, you can wave goodbye to free, high-quality shows." Written by Paul Farhi, a reporter for the Post's "Style" section, the article said: "Now is the time to root for the big guys, the conglomerates, the mega-studios."

Aside from some notable reports in The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, and New York Times that broached the question of whether this deal might not be good for people, the issue was off-limits. And even those papers that waved at it did not follow up, so the story died.

This paucity of press coverage makes it easier for the federal government to shirk its duties. Far from regulating the media giants, the government has served as the handmaiden to these electronic robber barons.

This oligopoly would never have passed legal muster if the regulators at the Federal Communications Commission and in the antitrust division of the Justice Department were doing their jobs, or if the Telecommunications Act of 1996 were not railroaded through Congress.

The regulators have let these mergers slide, under tremendous pressure from the telecommunications and entertainment industry. And it looks as though the Viacom/CBS merger will sail through, as well. Virtually no one in government is looking out for the public's interest in the media field.

The main defense provided by the government for its laxity is that the Internet upends the rationale for regulating media mergers--or for regulating media at all. It used to be that the major media companies possessed the only access to millions of Americans. Now with the Web, the argument goes, anyone can launch a site at marginal expense and compete directly with the existing media giants. So there is no need to worry about conglomerates. Proponents of the Internet act as though it is a massive comet crashing onto the Earth that will drive media giants into extinction.

This is nonsense.

The Internet is certainly changing the nature of our media system. But after five years, it has not spawned a competitive media marketplace; the giants have too many advantages to be seriously challenged. They have the programming, the brand names, the advertisers, the promotional prowess, and the capital to rule the Internet.

Media concentration is not a new phenomenon, but it has accelerated dramatically in the last decade, and it is taking a new and dangerous form.

Classically, media concentration was in the form of "horizontal integration," where a handful of firms tried to control as much production in their particular fields as possible. The U.S. film production industry, for instance, has been a tight-knit club effectively controlled by six or seven studios since the 1930s. That remains the case today: The six largest U.S. firms accounted for more than 90 percent of U.S. theater revenues in 1997. All but sixteen of Hollywood's 148 widely distributed films in 1997 were produced by these six firms, and many of those sixteen were produced by companies that had distribution deals with one of the six majors.

The newspaper industry underwent a spectacular consolidation from the 1960s to the 1980s, leaving half a dozen major chains ruling the roost. U.S. book publishing is now dominated by seven firms, the music industry by five, cable TV by six. Nearly all of these are now parts of vast media conglomerates.

That's why looking at specific media sectors fails to convey the extent or the nature of the system today, for no longer are media firms intent on horizontal integration. Today, they seek "vertical integration," not only producing content but also owning distribution. Moreover, they are major players in media sectors not traditionally thought to be related. These conglomerates own some combination of television networks, TV show production, TV stations, movie studios, cable channels, cable systems, music companies, magazines, newspapers, and book publishing firms.

This has all come about seemingly overnight. In 1983, Ben Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly (Beacon, 1984)...