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By Root 1420 0

deal with the Tomem Corporation in Japan to develop cable and interactive television there—the Baby Bells were looking for product to pump through their telephone wires and cellular systems. So Diller called on Cox Enterprises and S. I. Newhouse’s Advance Publications (which controls twenty-six newspapers, a cable system, and Random House, Inc., inter alia) for an initial pledge of $500 million each. Diller also was moved, if a little reluctantly, to rely on John C. Malone, one of the richest men in America and the acknowledged “King of Cable,” a controlling force in the country’s largest cable system, Tele-Communications (itself later involved in a gargantuan plan to merge with Bell Atlantic for $33 billion, although that deal may fall through), and in Liberty Media, a television programmer that owns Black Entertainment Television and the Family Channel and is itself a 22.5 percent owner of QVC. With Time Warner (which has a 25 percent share), Malone’s Tele-Communications (with a 23 percent share) also controls the Turner Broadcasting System, which was forced to turn to outside funding when Turner’s own burgeoning acquisitions outran his pocketbook. QVC, as the hostile would-be buyer of Paramount, is itself then owned not only by Barry Diller himself (12.6 percent) but also by John C. Malone (via Malone’s Liberty Media, which owns 22.2 percent of QVC), and Brian Robert’s Comcast Cable, which owns another 12.5 percent. Time Warner, which with Malone’s Tele-Communications owns Turner Broadcasting, controls another 9 percent. Nothing is quite as it seems. Everybody owns a piece of somebody and nobody is really on the outside. As with the shopping malls, the outside is all on the inside.

The details of the linkages and relationships are not the point here. A year from now, the mergers and alliances will have again shifted and some successful owners will be some other corporations’ prey. The players will not have changed, however, only the line score on their current game. There will still be a great many interlocking corporate structures shifting precariously on uncertain turf. Among the interstices of those structures just a few powerful individuals will continue to circulate—and only a tiny handful of them will be critical players on either the management or the creative side. Malone is a monied manager (“billionaire flunkey,” as he terms himself in his new role as Bell Atlantic vice chairman), Diller is a putative creative genius.8 In the bidding war between QVC and Viacom, Diller and Malone were bested and Sumner Redstone and Martin Davis have a temporary advantage. But in the process, the compass of players has narrowed again, and the interest that the public at large has in full access to the information highway, in maximum variety of fare and cultural diversity, and in real freedom of choice and expression, has in each case been further diminished.

The victory of the dollar over every other conceivable interest, public or private, entails not just a crass commercialism in the place where quality information and diversified entertainment should be, but also a monopoly antipathetic to democratic society and free civilization, if not also to capitalism itself. That “creative geniuses” like Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen join up gives their rivals nightmares, but will not necessarily enhance competition—or even creativity, though observers will once again celebrate synergy. Yet how can an Edgar Bronfman (Seagram) take on a Matsushita/MCA/ Universal Pictures without creating his own megamonopoly? Whatever else McWorld’s mergers may serve in the vital infotainment telesector, they serve neither culture nor liberty nor democracy.

This lugubrious conclusion brings us back to the same questions raised in the previous section by the impact of economic markets generally in McWorld. Spectators can vote with their dollars as well as with their private viewing and purchasing prejudices, but who speaks in the Hollyworld domain of McWorld for the public? Is there a global equivalent of even so weak an institution as the F.C.C.?