Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [192]
Chapter 9. Who Owns McWorld? The Media Merger Frenzy
1. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, fourth edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 19.
2. Bagdikian’s top twenty-three, listed alphabetically, are Bertelsmann, Capital Cities/ABC, Cox, CBS, Buena Vista Films, Dow Jones, Gannett, General Electric/NBC, Paramount (now Viacom), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Hearst, Ingersoll, International Thomson, Knight Ridder, Media News Group, Newhouse, News Corporation Ltd. (Murdoch), New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Scripps-Howard, Time Warner, Times Mirror, and the Tribune Company. Ibid., pp. 21–22.
3. Jolie Soloman, “Hollywood and Vice: Here Comes a New Golden Age,” Newsweek, August 23, 1993, p. 51.
4. Quoted by Cindy Skrzyki in her appropriately entitled piece, “Today, AT&T; Tomorrow, the Wireless World,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, August 30—September 5, 1993. Skrzyki comments: “It will make it possible for customers to stroll into an AT&T Phone Store and order everything from a cellular phone (which AT&T makes) to cellular service (which McCaw offers) to long-distance calling (over the AT&T network). On the technical side, AT&T switches may handle the call and AT&T software will tell the network which calls to send, hold, or put into a messaging system. And the slice of radio spectrum that AT&T would acquire as part of the deal gives it a precious commodity that is vital to launching new wireless devices that send and receive voice and data signals over the air.”
5. Quoted by Ken Auletta, “The Last Studio in Play,” The New Yorker, October 4, 1993, p. 80.
6. Calvin Sims, “Synergy: The Unspoken Word,” The New York Times, October 5, 1993, p. D I.
7. Ted Turner is chairman of the board and president of Turner Broadcasting, TNT, etc.; Sumner Redstone is CEO of Viacom and the feisty competitor for Paramount; for Barry Diller see text; Martin S. Davis is former president and CEO of Paramount; Michael Ovitz is chairman of the Creative Artists Agency and a key player in the MGM—Crédit Lyonnais deal; Bill Gates is the power behind Microsoft; and John C. Malone is president of Tele-Communication, part-time chair of Liberty Media, as well as a one-quarter owner of Turner Broadcasting, which makes him a major force beyond Barry Diller’s QVC Network.
For a biography of one of the great masters of communications and entertainment who set the course for many of the men here, see Connie Bruck, Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
8. Fortune says Malone is now worth over a billion dollars. His sobriquet as king of cable is reported by Allen R. Myerson, “A Corporate Man and a Cable King,” The New York Times, October 14, 1993, p. C 7.
9. The declaration is offered as an appendix in Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business, 1990).
10. Cited by Ken Auletta, “Under the Wire,” The New Yorker, January 17, 1994, p. 52. Gore genuinely believes in the role of government as a regulator and equalizer, but after the elections of November 1994, there is little to suggest he will get much support in Congress or the nation.
PART II. THE OLD WORLD OF JIHAD
Chapter 10. Jihad vs. McWorld or Jihad via McWorld?
1. See David Gonzalez, “The Computer Age Bids Religious World to Enter,” The New York Times, July 24, 1994, Section 1, p. 1.
2. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). I have explored the ironies of Bloom’s complaint elsewhere in An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), Chapter 5.
3. The Rudolphs suggest that “Clinton and others too easily invoke ‘ancient hatreds’ to explain what are really contemporary conflicts. The question, in other words, is not why old conflicts