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By Root 1367 0

much as a glance from federal authorities who once upon a time would have been screaming for antitrust action. Since earlier regulation depended on “spectrum scarcity” (the seemingly finite character of available broadcast wavelengths and delivery conduits), the explosion of media outlets and delivery vehicles—fiber optic communications that can carry millions of digitalized information and picture bytes, cable systems with a five-hundred-plus channel capacity, and satellites—coupled with our current passion for markets and for privatization have delegitimized the very idea of public regulation. They make it impossible for us to use McWorld’s chief invention—television—to preserve our public goods and identity against McWorld’s values. We cannot even use the public airwaves for public political purpose (elections) without paying the private companies to whom we have licensed those airwaves millions and millions of dollars. Kenichi Ohmae, Japan’s most celebrated management guru, captures the spirit of videology perfectly when he puts his faith in the power of “customers to triumph over man as regulator,” since “it’s the regulators we have to fear.”32

A few countries still try to maintain some control, if not monopoly control, over the traditional broadcast media, but with diminishing success against the diversifying technologies that undergird new media. As communication shifts from broadcast spectra and cable to computer faxes, telephone lines, and satellites the very idea of governmental regulation—let alone “totalitarian” control—loses its credibility. Congress is currently threatening to privatize or abolish public broadcasting. In theory, this might seem to be a good thing: in dismantling state monopolies, the market puts an end to monopoly altogether. In practice it merely eliminates public monopolies and with them accountability and civic responsibility and leaves the field to new, relatively invisible, private monopolies that, unlike government, are not even accountable in theory, let alone in practice. These monopolies are today becoming ever more visible as companies from the once distinct realms of program creation (software), program distribution (networks and broadcast companies), delivery systems (cable, telephone, satellite), and hardware (the people who make the television receivers and computers) gobble one another up. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, but it owns a global array of media-interlinked companies and services including, in the United States: Fox Television; Fox Video; New York magazine; TV Guide; HarperCollins Publishers; Delphi Internet Services; Scott Foresman educational publishers; News and Electronic Data information services; Kesmai video game development corporation; Etak, Inc., the Digital map data company; Mirabella, the fashion magazine; and literally dozens of newspapers and independent television stations; and elsewhere, The Times of London along with the tabloid The Sun; Ansett Transport, an air cargo carrier; B Sky B, the English satellite broadcaster; Star TV, which is the Asian satellite network described above; Geographia Ltd., the cartography company; and Fox Video companies in Spain, Japan, France, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. Murdoch’s News Corporation is a one-company, one-man infotainment telesector unto itself.

The elementary theory of markets argues that with the dismantling of state communication monopolies, monopoly will go while the public interest stays; in fact, the public interest has gone and monopoly has persisted, in new privatized and thus unaccountable forms. There is nothing wrong with profit. As the engine of capitalism, it is a good thing for shareholders, consumers, and society at large. But it has turned out to exercise a sovereignty no less coercive but far less public-spirited than the state’s. It imposes a uniformity all its own, but one hidden behind the screen of free-market competition. Murdoch’s global influence may be scarcely recognized, let alone felt. Hollywood’s hegemony may feel good—certainly