Corporate Media Is about to Get So Much Worse

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Kristoffer Ealy

I was hoping it wasn’t going to come to this, but I braced myself for it anyway. Anyone who has been paying attention to the media landscape over the past year knew this moment was coming. Warner Bros. Discovery was never going to remain independent forever. The debt load was too heavy, the streaming wars too brutal, and Wall Street’s patience too thin. A merger was inevitable. The only real question was which corporate giant would end up holding the leash — and, more importantly, who was going to get walked.

I wrote extensively about this possibility because corporate consolidation in media never ends well for journalism, audiences, or frankly anyone who enjoys creativity that hasn’t been focus-grouped into emotional beige. Still, if a merger had to happen, I found myself rooting — reluctantly, the way you root for the less bad option at a buffet where everything looks questionable — for Netflix to win the bidding war. Netflix at least understands distribution in the modern era. Paramount represents something else entirely: legacy consolidation dressed up as innovation, the media equivalent of your grandfather buying Jordans and insisting he’s still got it.

And because the universe apparently enjoys testing my blood pressure, the worst-case scenario has arrived. Paramount is preparing to take control of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at $110 billion. One hundred and ten billion dollars. To put that in perspective: that is enough money to fund the entire CPB public broadcasting budget for roughly the next thousand years. Instead, we’re using it to create a single corporate entity that owns Batman, CNN, SpongeBob SquarePants, Harry Potter, and the Golf Channel simultaneously, which is either the most American thing that has ever happened or proof that we deserve whatever comes next.

I won’t sugarcoat it. It sucks.

https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/corporate-media-is-about-to-get-so

[snot]

1. Remember the Telecom Act of 1996,

which repealed restrictions on the consolidation of media ownership? Before that Act, there were hundreds if not thousands of independently-owned news outlets.

Even if antitrust law were appropriately enforced, it is insufficient to protect us from harms due to media consolidation because it would require proof that the lack of competition among outlets caused measurable economic losses to consumers, which can be nearly impossible to prove when the "product" is information rather than goods or services. Even if you could show that, e.g., subscription prices for news services were higher than they might otherwise have been, the difference is probably not big enough to compensate you for the real harms done, which are informational and moral – and how do you measure those in dollars?

(E.g., could you prove an exact amount of economic loss that you've personally suffered due to, say, the MSM's failure to adequately cover the arrest and conviction of four black activist leaders for "conspiring to sow political discord" – allegedly at the behest of Russia, even though the their supposedly illegal behavior consisted in nothing more than the same kinds of activism for black equity and reparations that they'd been fighting for for the previous 50 years? {see https://www.courthousenews.com/black-rights-activists-convicted-of-conspiracy-not-guilty-of-acting-as-russian-agents/ })

Imho, we need to restore the restrictions on media consolidation that we once enjoyed, AND we need a body of antitrust law of information, as well as the one we have for $.