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[ 395 ] Chapter 13 Big Media Get Bigger, 1980–1999 Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. —Stewart Brand, 1987 By the end of the twentieth century, the news business was, in economic terms, beyond mature. It was almost senescent, having begun in the fifteenth century and having long ago brought to a point of logical fulfillment a business and professional model that appeared to guarantee high profits in perpetuity. After a shakeout in the middle of the century, the newspaper industry had mostly slipped the bonds of competition. Most daily papers serving small and mediumsized cities existed as local monopolies, and a fair number of papers serving bigger cities had no real competition either. Even the New York Times, operating in an apparently crowded newspaper market, enjoyed an effective monopoly within its circulation area, because the Times was not competing with the other New York–area dailies, nor did they dare challenge the Times. For educated, affluent readers in the tri-state area who wanted to know about national and international affairs as well as business news, sports, arts, and “style,” there was essentially no alternative. The big newsmagazines Time and Newsweek constituted a “duopoly.” Radio, a formerly diverse industry, was consolidating as fast as possible in the 1990s, resulting in such continent-straddling behemoths as Clear Channel Communications . The television business was not (strictly speaking) a monopoly but an oligopoly, a situation in which a limited number of sellers dominate a market for millions of buyers. Like the Big Three automakers, the big three networks [ 396 ] CHAPTER 13 spent the middle and later years of the twentieth century battling one another at the margins over their huge slices of the American pie, scorning at first the new business of delivering TV signals by cable. And in all media, the big kept getting bigger. In just a few years during the second half of the 1980s, Capital Cities Communications bought ABC; News Corp. launched Fox TV; GE announced that it was buying NBC; the FCC repealed the fairness doctrine, facilitating the rise of talk radio; and Time Inc. merged with Warner Bros. to create the biggest American media conglomerate of them all, Time Warner. In this setting, it is no surprise that the professional values of American journalism (the ideals of independence, truthfulness, diversity) came under pressure. A major portion of that pressure arose from the tensions inherent in trying to house a critical professional institution like journalism inside the big modern corporation. This tension became especially acute during the conglomerate phase. There was a “cultural contradiction” in the news business between news values and business values. Media executives were making business decisions that were normal for large, profitable, publicly traded corporations seeking to prosper as businesses. One goal they sought was to create monopolies wherever they could. In this they were so successful that profit margins began to rise, then soared to 20 percent a year and higher. The problem for journalism is that while monopolies are profitable, they represent the fulfillment of a commercial value, not a professional one. Indeed, the values of journalism lean toward competition and a multiplicity of views, not toward the arrogance and narrowing of views associated with monopoly. The reality of monopoly is corrupting in another way, too. As Liebling warned many times, in a one-paper town, the readers get only as much news as the publisher feels like paying for. With no competition, there is less incentive to spend money on reporting. Another source of conflict in the misfit between news and business is the issue of size. The goal of most business executives is to expand; in the news business, executives expand by launching or acquiring more and more newspapers, magazines , radio channels, and television stations. If a media company already owns all those things, its executives might venture into other areas, such as companies that coach young people on how to take standardized tests (as the Washington Post Company did in acquiring Kaplan, Inc., which eventually came to provide the majority of the company’s revenues, transforming the enterprise into a test-prep company that publishes a newspaper as a sideline). The news business was becoming part of Big Media. In order to make all...

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