Media monoliths: are today's entertainment conglomerates controlling too much of what Americans read, listen to, and watch?

• Author: Kafka, Peter
• Position: National

Lackluster reviews of the movie King Arthur didn't stop the ABC show 20/20 from devoting an entire segment to the Arthurian legend last July, featuring multiple clips of the movie and interviews with the cast, director, and producer.

ABC and Touchstone Studios, which made King Arthur, have the same corporate owner--the Walt Disney Company. Given the nurnber of films Disney makes, and the number of TV and cable channels it owns, it would be nearly impossible for the company not to report on its own products.

But to some critics, the King Arthur example raises a key question in an age of media conglomerates: Did ABC cover the film because it was deserving or because it would benefit Disney, its corporate parent?

In recent years, media mergers have helped a handful of giant companies grow ever larger and exert more control over the movies and TV shows we watch; the music we listen to; the books, magazines, and newspapers we read; the Web sites we go to, and even the billboards we see while driving around town.

THE NETWORKS

Besides ABC, all three of the other major TV networks (NBC, CBS, and Fox) are now owned by companies that also own studios, and many other media ventures: In addition to CBS and the Paramount Pictures movie studio, for instance, Viacom Inc. also owns cable networks like MTV, BET, and Showtime; book publisher Simon 8: Schuster; more than 180 radio stations; the Blockbuster video chain; and the biggest billboard company in the U.S.

Some observers worry that as media companies continue to grow, they will have the ability to limit or dictate what the public sees and hears. Will consumers know whether a news show is focusing on a particular product--say, a movie or an electronic game--because it's newsworthy, or because the show and the product are owned by the same company? Will companies promote the viewpoints of their owners (whether liberal or conservative) to the exclusion of opposing views?

"We get all of our information that we use to live our lives from the media--what food to eat, what movies to see, how we feel about issues," says Cheryl Leanza, formerly the deputy director at the Media Access Project, a consumer advocacy group opposed to media consolidation. "When only a few people at the end of the day decide what information that media distributes, it limits the ideas."

Leanza worries, for instance, that Time magazine featured the Brad Pitt movie Troy on one of its covers last May not because the movie was worthy of attention, but because it was made by Time's corporate sibling, Warner Bros. studios. Both are owned by Time Warner, which also owns, among other assets, cable channels like HBO and CNN; magazines like Entertainment Weekly, People, and Sports Illustrated; America Online; and Time Warner Cable, which provides service to 11 million homes.

A Time spokesperson says the company's magazines never give Time Warner products special treatment, noting that the magazine has given covers to movies like Spider-Man, produced by Sony's Columbia Pictures, and Star Wars, distributed by Fox. And ABC Vice President Jeffrey Schneider says his network covers Disney movies like King Arthur only because programmers think viewers are interested; the fact that Disney gets free promotion from the segment is an afterthought, he says: "If you simply jam [corporate] synergy down people's throats, it won't be good for the...