Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [85]
The process that leads to conglomeration seems natural enough: carriers want to control and profit from what they carry; cultural creators want to control and profit from the entities (stations and networks) that carry what they create; software purveyors want to control and profit from the hardware on which their wares are purveyed. Everyone wants a piece of the creative core, where the “content” that drives everything else is manufactured. Why be a pipe for someone else’s music, when you can own composer and composition alike? But the consequences are to obliterate the conceptual distinctions by which the key elements of this section were sorted out—films, television, books, and theme parks—as government looks passively on. “The idea,” reports Newsweek, “is to get a piece of every pie in the business. Sony now brings you Mariah Carey on your Sony Walkman, Wheel of Fortune on your Trinitron and Sleepless in Seattle in its Loews theaters with Sony sound systems.”3 Or, as Alex J. Mandl (chief executive officer of AT&T’s Communications Services Group) says in explaining AT&T’s $12.6 billion projected buyout of McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. (it didn’t quite come to pass), “we’d like to see the AT&T brand on a national basis. We can offer end-to-end service.”4 The key to it all remains the informational/creative core, the software. In the terse words of Sumner Redstone, “software is the name of the game.”5
The vertical integration of media is a relatively new phenomenon. Bagdikian’s careful record-keeping suggests that most newspapers and magazines remained independent from the end of World War II into the 1970s. The early mergers occurred within sectors, creating newspaper empires, book conglomerates, and movie studio mergers—an unwelcome intrusion of monopoly but one that respected the boundaries separating different kinds of information and entertainment and that studiously avoided the durable-goods production domains on which spectators and consumers depended. As recently as the 1970s there were hundreds of independent newspaper, magazine, and book publishers each with their own print niche, scores of independent film production studios (and viable film industries in several dozen countries around the world), three big networks along with a large number of independent stations, one nationwide phone company responsible for universal phone service and nothing else, and dozens of hardware companies that produced the durable goods through which the public received the competing soft goods of all the entertainment and information producers—TVs, phone wire, cassette recorders, tuners, computers, and so on.
Yet at the beginning of the eighties, partly in response to the more general merger mania but primarily as a result of ambitious and visionary media empire builders like Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch—their vision was possessive, their ambition absolute—boundaries of every kind were crossed. Mimicking Gulf & Western’s precedent-setting takeover of Paramount back in 1966 for $125 million, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Matsushita, and Sony targeted entertainment companies not simply as another vehicle of diversification but as a way into the ruling house of McWorld’s emerging civilization. By the middle of the 1990s relatively new companies like the Home Shopping Network, Viacom, and Blockbuster Video were engaged in rivalry and reciprocal takeovers and were positioning themselves as the dominant entertainment/selling conglomerates of the new millennium.
This takeover mania began in the early 1980s, with quite literally hundreds of media mergers and buyouts, of which I have listed only a representative sample on the accompanying table of media mergers.