Ben Bagdikian, 82-year-old former journalism dean at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the book "The Media Monopoly," believes that the rise of media behemoths like AOL Time Warner and Viacom pose a threat to society and the nation's democratic underpinnings.

		When you look at the table of organization within these very large corporate entities, news is a very small box and very removed from the company leadership.

"In the case of AOL Time Warner, we're now seeing the fallout from an illusion that was widespread a few years ago that the future of media lay heavily in the dotcom industry," he says in a phone interview.

"AOL was riding high on Wall Street, and Time Warner was seen as the Rust Belt of publishing, an old-fashioned media company that put out materials on paper and movies on film. Well, it turns out that's the part of the business that is keeping AOL Time Warner alive today.

"In the process, the quality of news has suffered, because when one large company has a dominant position across all media, it's in their economic interests to concentrate on media that can be recycled and self-promoted within the empire," he says. "A movie provides a soundtrack that can be issued in a CD by the same company. The stars and singers can be featured on the company's magazines and recycled on the company's talk shows.

"In that formula, news is a problem because it's not recyclable. So the company will concentrate on celebrity and entertainment, which are recyclable and can be used in synergistic fashion."

Ben Bagdikian

When "The Media Monopoly" first appeared in 1983, Bagdikian was alarmed that more than half of the media outlets in this country were controlled by 50 corporations. By the 1997 edition of his book, that number had dropped to 10. Today it stands at six (AOL Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., Disney, General Electric and Bertelsmann).

The result is a landscape of media giants whose political clout in Washington should raise alarm about their collective power as well as concerns about the independent watchdog role that the news media play in covering the federal government, he says.
 
Bagdikian recalls the high-minded promises made by the architects of the AOL Time Warner merger two years ago that the union would not affect news coverage and would offer customers more content choices, not fewer.

"I know that speech by heart," he says. "It's made by every large corporate leader, but it's just not true. News almost never escapes shareholders' demands for maximum profits. As for promises not to interfere in the editorial process, when the stakes are high enough, there always is an intrusion. We've seen it with Disney clamping down on dissident voices and hard-nosed journalism, and we will see it at AOL Time Warner."

While the corporate honchos talk about synergy, Bagdikian says, customers get shortchanged by the incredible shrinking diversity of content. Remember the AOL Time Warner executive at the top who sang the praises of reduced duplication of effort in covering events like the Oscars? That's exactly what worries Bagdikian.

"Ultimately, what you're talking about is fewer choices, fewer journalists in the field, fewer foreign news bureaus, fewer news stories, fewer programming choices available," he says. "Diversity of channels does not give you diversity of content. You really need diversity of outlets to find a true diversity of voices and points of view."
 
News organizations within these mega-corporations face several problems, Bagdikian says. The quality of the journalism suffers as shrinking resources are devoted to enterprises that contribute to the company's bottom line. News gets dumbed-down by an emphasis on entertainment and fluff that can be recycled to attract bigger audiences. And the honesty of the journalism suffers as reporters and editors face the ethical minefield and formidable conflicts of interest inevitable in covering an enterprise with such far-flung business interests.

"Reporters and editors know which stories and which leads they're not supposed to pursue," he says. "Nobody needs to send them a memo."

News, when it does appear on the corporate radar screen, is often an irritant or minor consideration. "When you look at the table of organization within these very large corporate entities, news is a very small box and very removed from the company leadership. When they do think about news, it's supposed to do its part in producing profits."

Bagdikian reminds us: "News has a high value within society. Even though we say nobody reads it, it's not true."

As for AOL Time Warner, which controls the news content for tens of millions of Americans, he says, "They have enormous power to inform and an ethical obligation to look beyond the demands of Wall Street to serve the public's interest."

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