Goliath swallows leviathan: conglomerates and the media - commentary on the impact of media and technology

Commonweal, Nov 7, 1997 by Frank McConnell

Millennial fever is upon us, and it's pandemic. Never mind that Clio, the Muse of history, doesn't really pay much mind to our highly arbitrary calendrical reckonings. We want her to, and I'm not sure whether completely resisting that visionary tug is the sign of a resolute mind or a dull one. That tug helps explain the sad ecstasy of the Hale-Boppers of the Heaven's Gate cult; and, at another (not higher) level, the recent elaborate academic debate about whether or not we are living through "The End of History."

It's also the context in which to read the fascinating, feisty collection of essays, Conglomerates and the Media, by Erik Barnouw and others (The New Press, $23, 208 pp.). Not that Conglomerates is "about" the millennium in any explicit way: In fact I'm not sure the word even appears in its pages. But if there really is a potentially massive transformation of life pressing on us here at the turn of the century, it's got to be the current explosion, proliferation, and interrelation of information technologies, from the printed book through the compact disc and the TV sitcom to the Internet, that seem to be changing our conception of "reality" (as Nabokov says, the only word that should always be enclosed in quotes) altogether.

And is that transformation of consciousness - the mediazation of the planet - a good thing or bad? Thirty years ago, Marshall McLuhan told us that the growth of electronic media would eventually make the world a "global village": smarmy and homey - unless the village is named Salem. And twenty years later we had - -or you did, if you own a personal computer - the "worldwide web," where everybody can talk to everybody: splendid, except that a web can be, if produced by an artisan, creative, but if by a spider, a trap. And then Bill Gates announced the apocalyptic coming of the information superhighway: but the point of getting on a highway is that you know where it's going; so what kind of global village what Gates's heaven - is this one leading to?

None of the fine media critics in Conglomerates plays with these now-permanent metaphors for the infotech universe. They're smarter, and focused on the troubling question of what happens to "reality" when "reality" is both defined by its transmission by the media and determined by an ever-smaller number of massive, transnational culture trusts. "Who monopolized Time Life and Fortune?" asked William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch (1958). "News is the only constitutionally protected product in America," writes essayist Barnouw. "News matters, though today, it is treated as just another commodity."

That's the key sentence of this collection. Corporate apparatchiks love the word "synergy," for the profitable blending of infotech delivery systems. "Synergy" means this: Disney now owns ABC and ABC owns a number of major publishing companies and the Washington Post and the Post corporation runs Newsweek, but is itself - somewhere up or down the line - linked with bigger publishing trusts and fast-food empires, and so on into the Mandelbrot Set of infinitely finer-tuned self-recapitulations.

The good news is that after ABC and Newsweek tell you Disney's latest film is fun, you'll see it, enjoy it, and when you take the kids to Burger King you'll get a "Pocahontas" Pepsi cup - free! The bad news is that experience is, increasingly, something sold to you: and sold in an ever-smaller store of wares. (Nor is ABC the only case. General Electric owns NBC, CBS belongs to Westinghouse, Warner owns Time - everybody, in short, is in bed with everybody.)

Sounds conspiratorial and apocalyptic, doesn't it? And it's all true: not a Burroughs or Pynchon fantasy but traceable in Variety and the Wall Street Journal alike. So far the Internet seems exempt from the mergermania, although the recent bailout (and swallowing?) of Apple by Microsoft - which happened after this book was put together - does not bode altogether cheerful.

Conglomerates is a collection of eight essays about the implications of this media-multiplexing in such areas as TV news, newspapers, book publishing, the film industry, and telecommunications. All the contributors - the book began as a lecture series at New York University in 1996 - are established media mavens, and their conclusions about the cultural effect of mergermania are, generally, glum.

No surprise: The absolute and global commodification of information can't help but trivialize information as pure commodity; even Adam Smith, Barnouw reminds us, warned against a "government of merchants.'.' No one who has watched the swift decline of TV news will quarrel: for example, the Today show, since Bryant Gumbel's departure, has largely degenerated into a happytalk puppet show, which doesn't even bother anymore to run a news summary at the top of its last half-hour. Ditto Hollywood, where the motivation for the next overhyped blockbuster is patently not so much to make a good film as to use the film to pimp for the spinoff theme-park rides and tchotchkes on sale at Wal-Mart and Jack in the Box - not to mention the comic books, novelizations, und so weiter. The millennial Big Thing, that is, may turn out to be the apocalypse of the bland: not the global village, but the global mall; not the end of Revelation but the end of Pope's Dunciad, where universal dullness covers all.