Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [84]
9
Who Owns McWorld?
The Media Merger Frenzy
THE INFOTAINMENT TELESECTOR is the heart of McWorld and increasingly has the look of a wholly owned subsidiary of a small handful of powerful corporations that, by the month, grow fewer in number and more encompassing in ambition. The concept that drives the new media merger frenzy carries the fashionable name “synergy,” which describes what is supposed to be the cultural creativity and economic productivity that arise out of conglomerating the disparate industries that once, quite separately, controlled all three segments of the infotainment telesector: the software programming, the conduits and pipes that distribute it, and the hardware on which it is displayed. The production companies turning out product, the phone and cable and satellite companies, and the companies manufacturing or controlling television sets and computers and multiplexes all, in McWorld’s ideal economy, belong in the hands of one global company. Synergy turns out to be a polite way of saying monopoly. And in the domain of information, monopoly is a polite word for uniformity, which is a polite word for virtual censorship—censorship not as a consequence of political choices but as a consequence of inelastic markets, imperfect competition, and economies of scale—the quest for a single product that can be owned by a single proprietor and sold to every living soul on the planet.
Traditional corporate ambitions that aimed at monopoly within a particular medium have been displaced by the drive for monopoly across media. By the 1990s, according to Bagdikian, seventeen intermedia conglomerates were earning half the total revenues “from all media” including recordings, cable, and videocassettes.1 Conglomeration had reduced the number of players from forty-six in 1981 to twenty-three in 1991, of which a handful are genuinely intermedia.2 Moreover, Bagdikian was describing the situation just before the Japanese buy-in and the very recent erosion of boundaries between telephone, cable, and broadcast transmission that has accelerated the conglomeration process even more radically.
Corporations are aiming at control over each step of the image-making process from source to consumer. Where once an author wrote a book and (perhaps via an agent) sold it to a publisher who then printed it, sold serial rights to an independent magazine, and then found still other independent distributors and booksellers to sell it; and where once the author or agent or publisher marketed it to Hollywood, where an independent film studio bought it and turned it into a film, and then found an autonomous distributor to release it and an independent movie-house owner or chain to show it; and where once the film studio sold rights to an independent broadcaster to show the film on television—so that when the full commercial cycle was completed perhaps a few dozen different independent entities participated in a complex, competitive process to bring a creative work to an extended multimedia public by means that allowed both entry and exit for many different creative and financial forces, and maximized choice and opportunity for cultural creators and cultural consumers alike—today the wonders of synergy permit one entity to control the entire process. Not only is the corporate proprietor of a conglomerate likely to own a stable of publishers, one of which will publish a given book, but it can also own the agency that sells the book, the magazine that serializes it, the movie studio that buys and films it, the distributor that purveys it, the cinema chain that screens it, the video export firm that brings it to the global market, and perhaps even the satellite pods or wires through which it is broadcast and the television set and VCR on which it is finally screened somewhere in, say, Indonesia or Nigeria. This is not synergy: this is commercial totalitarianism—a single value (profit)