Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [87]
The complicated, interlocking corporate structures of these companies cannot eclipse the powerful light cast by the handful of luminous personalities who have followed Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Goldwyn up Hollywood’s Mt. Olympus. Michael Eisner, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, Barry Diller, Martin S. Davis, David Geffen, George Lucas, Michael Ovitz, Bill Gates, Jeffrey Katzenberg, H. Wayne Huizenga, John C. Malone, and Steven Spielberg currently stand at the summit, far above the uncertain corporate tides. They are (changing metaphors) sharks in a Gulf (& Western, now Paramount) Stream who dream of a world they alone imagine and image.7 The alliances shift, the tides sweep in, but the players do not change: disappointed by Eisner, Katzenberg has joined Geffen and Spielberg; having digested Paramount, Redstone looks to dine with Huizenga; maltreated by Davis, Diller joins with Murdoch, only to cut himself loose and eventually go after Davis’s Paramount.
The story of this last figure, QVC’s Barry Diller, can stand as a symbol of the new media monopolies’ predatory politics, which, though they may serve shareholders’ interests in the short run (apparently the only public interest for which the courts have any concern), serve neither competition, nor choice, nor creativity, nor the public good in the short or long term. Barry Diller has been a force in Hollywood for many years, and in the early eighties, after an apprenticeship in film production, ended up at Paramount, quickly rising to a production post where he was a mentor to young producers like Scott Rudin. Tensions with Martin Davis, head of Paramount then and now, led to Diller’s ouster. Diller went on to Fox where he established the Fox Television Network and prospered until Fox was purchased by Rupert Murdoch in 1992. Though invited to stay, Diller wanted a financial stake in Fox that Murdoch would not give him, so he moved on and into what many observers thought would be a career-ending cul de sac—QVC, the home-shopping network. QVC had stumbled on to one of McWorld’s simplest and profoundest truths earlier than most players: television is consumption and commercials constitute its most popular programming. Let consumers buy what they watch, and you have united television and mall-dom—McWorld’s two most powerful domains. As MTV and the newer and highly popular and profitable half-hour and one-hour infomercials demonstrate, the public scarcely can tell where commercial programming ends and programmed commercials begin. And, to the extent they can tell the difference, viewers may actually prefer the latter to the former. For Diller, QVC not only embodied the corporate philosophy of the bottom line that was driving mergers, it gave him a platform from which to create his own empire. When Sumner Redstone made a friendly offer to buy Paramount in the summer of 1993, Barry Diller saw an opportunity to parlay his emblematic company into genuine Hollyworld power and at the same time to even accounts with Martin Davis, his earlier nemesis at Paramount. Personal ambition enhanced by communications synergy yielded a still higher synergy that, with the help of court decisions critical of Paramount’s favoritism toward Viacom, nearly enabled Barry Diller to complete the unfriendly deal that would have let him annex the last major independent studio save Disney.
In Hollywood, where no man is an island and every takeover demands at least a corporate archipelago, Diller had help. Viacom’s Redstone was lining up financial support to the tune of $600 million from Blockbuster Video under H. Wayne Huizenga (with whom he eventually merged and who was already in control of Republic Pictures and Spelling Entertainment as well as three Miami sports franchises); and $1.2 billion from NYNEX, which had just struck another synergistic