Editorial: Media Mergers: "Bigger Is Better" Isn't Necessarily Better

The headlines these days tell the simple story that "bigger is better," more American than apple pie, even though the economic context is a mix of the old world of huge, competing corporations, mostly in industrialized countries, and the new world of global corporations battling for profit and real estate in cyberspace. "Merger Forges New Media Giant," ¹ or "Leading Media Companies Forming Joint Web Venture." ² Hardly a day passes without another banner headline about a media acquisition. Each headline reflects a mad scramble of unchecked growth distinctly reminiscent of the wild expansion of the American economy one hundred years ago. Then, Congress passed the historic Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which attempted to constrain the abuse and exploitation of workers and consumers. For much of the twentieth century, this combination of economic expansion and human compassion coexisted for the benefit of the country.

Now, we seem to be rushing heedlessly into another age of monopolies and oligopolies, paying little attention to the traditional American distrust of anything too big or too powerful. An essential contradiction cuts through recent economic developments. At the same time that Americans super-size everything from their fries to their houses to their multiplex movie theaters, they are inherently suspicious of any one person or company with too much power. In the fall of 1999, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly, triggering an extraordinary mediation effort before any punitive action would be ordered, and the Justice Department raised questions about whether the then-pending MCI-Sprint deal would be approved. Americans don't like monopolies, but at the turn of the millennium they are learning to live with them.

The net result is uncharted and unprecedented change in the media, raising questions about journalism and, in a broader context, about the legitimacy of information obtained from outlets with possible conflicts of interest. Is democracy strengthened or weakened by the flow of more news operations into fewer corporate hands? Will the quality of news programming be improved by unorthodox media alliances, such as the one late in 1999 between the Washington Post and MSNBC? Will the Post and MSNBC routinely run each other's stories? Does the lawless and ruleless Internet facilitate a genuine democratization of the political dialogue, as many of its supporters hope? Or does it simply coarsen the dialogue by unleashing a torrent of unreliable and uncheckable information?

To discuss these questions, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy invited politicians, scholars, journalists, and industry representatives to a special conference at its Washington, D.C., office in October 1999. It was "special" in the sense that every point of view was solicited from across the ideological spectrum, from one end to the other, resulting in a robust discussion of consumer rights and the impact of the new technology on a free press and a vibrant democracy. No solutions were expected, and none emerged. If anything, the initial questions only raised further questions. Clearly, everyone respected the unavoidable fact that we were all in the swirl of a technological revolution, with the ultimate outcome far from clear.

On one side of the debate were all of those who trumpeted the glories and potential of the new technology. They argued, somewhat predictably, that cable and the Internet were the cyber equivalents of a supermall, providing consumers with access to every imaginable product. Nothing was beyond reach. The obvious question was then raised: Isn't the new technology essentially elitist, not yet available to most people? No, they claimed, quite the contrary. It was democratizing and decidedly nonelitist, for it provided consumers (or citizens) with every size, shape, and flavor of the most important product of this age--namely, information.

The Internet was seen as the magical conveyor belt. It stood at the center of every vision...