Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [77]
Bagdikian’s dominant twenty-three corporations:
Bertelsmann, A.G. (books)
Capital Cities/ABC (newspapers, broadcasting)
Cox Communications (newspapers)
CBS (broadcasting)
Buena Vista Films (Disney; motion pictures)
Dow Jones (newspapers)
Gannett (newspapers)
General Electric (television)
Paramount Communications (books, motion pictures)
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (books)
Hearst (newspapers, magazines)
Ingersoll (newspapers)
International Thomson (newspapers)
Knight Ridder (newspapers)
Media News Group (Singleton; newspapers)
Newhouse (newspapers, books, magazines)
News Corporation Ltd. (Murdoch; newspapers, magazines, motion pictures)
New York Times (newspapers)
Reader’s Digest Association (books)
Scripps-Howard (newspapers)
Time Warner (magazines, books, motion pictures)
Times Mirror (newspapers)
Tribune Company (magazines)
Vertical integration and horizontal integration go hand in hand: the imperative is to own deep and own wide. If you own movies, buy book companies and theme parks and sports teams (Paramount acquiring Simon & Schuster, Viacom buying Paramount). If you own hardware, buy software (Sony swallowing Columbia). If you own television stations, buy film libraries (Turner imbibing MGM’s library). If you own telephone wires, buy software. It is not just a matter of eliminating the competitors who are trying to profit by doing the same thing you do; it is a matter of buying up all the people who do what you don’t do, but what nevertheless impacts on your business. If you own wires, get programming to push through the wires. If you own a film studio, get a satellite station so you can control subsidiary broadcasting rights. If you are into newspapers, buy cable and satellite systems and then you will own the news in every medium. If you make movies, buy publishers and leverage the writers. If you are on your own, create a new leviathan: imitate Steven Spielberg, the world’s most successful director; Jeffrey Katzenberg, a rich and powerful producer recently cut loose from Disney; and David Geffen, billionaire recording executive. And join up, conjure a little synergy: make a deal with Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, to produce interactive, multimedia entertainment products. Get a half-billion-dollar investment from Gates and call the joint venture (what else?) Dreamworks. The newspapers compared the deal projected by this triumvirate to the founding of United Artists by Mary Pickford and her friends sixty years ago, but that would be to compare a flotilla of battleships to a couple of cap-gun-toting kids in a rowboat. Steven Spielberg was closer to the mark when he apparently misspoke himself and declared he was founding a “new country.”15
Skeptics will insist, looking at the haplessness of Sony and Matsushita in the moving-picture business, that ownership does not touch artistic independence and that who owns publishers does not really matter. Certainly that is what Richard Snyder, the longtime chief of Simon & Schuster, dutifully said when Viacom took over Simon & Schuster’s parent company Paramount. Regarded as both invulnerable and indispensable, too entrenched and too invaluable to fire, Snyder was gone within a year of the takeover, leaving stunned observers like agent Mort Janklow saying that Viacom must think selling books is like selling popcorn.16 What Viacom knows is that in McWorld’s global markets selling books is like selling pop corn: that’s the whole point. Otherwise, why buy Paramount? Under Viacom, Paramount has also taken over Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., another major publisher. Before the merger was even completed, Paramount announced it would “reorganize divisions, reduce the number of imprints and published titles and lay off up to ten percent” of the ten thousand employees of the firm.17
In fact, far from being the exception to merger mania, the