Media

A silver lining to the AOL-Time Warner cloud

Media by Dan Kennedy

Within hours of Monday's announcement that America Online would acquire Time Warner in a $165 billion stock swap, the Institute for Public Accuracy blast-faxed out a compendium of gloom-and-doom quotes from progressive media observers. From Robert McChesney, the author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: "It hammers the last nail in the coffin of those utopians who regarded the Internet as providing the mechanism to radically change our media culture for the better." From Jill Nelson, the author of Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience: "This may be good for business, but it's bad for people and the free flow of information. In our lust for profits, we have forgotten democratic principles." From Ben Bagdikian, the author of The Media Monopoly: "This acquisition is standard in the strategy of media corporations that no significant media company in the country will remain independent."

Now, I'm willing to believe that the AOL-Time Warner merger will somehow be bad, and not just because the price of my AOL stock has plummeted this week. And I certainly respect the views of McChesney, Nelson, and Bagdikian, all of whom have important things to say about the increasing concentration and corporatization of the media.

But this is not the Viacom-CBS merger, which brought disparate content providers uneasily together under one roof. It's not even the "partnership" between the Washington Post Company and NBC News, which could lead to a diminution in the number of journalistic voices. Rather, this joins Time Warner, the world's biggest media company, with what is essentially a distribution system. And at least one of the outcomes may actually be for the good.

AOL, for its own selfish reasons, has been a prime force in the "open access" movement, aimed at requiring cable companies to open their high-speed systems to all Internet service providers, just as the phone companies are required to do (see "Net Loss," News and Features, January 7). AOL has been battling AT&T, the cable giant that's trying to hog Internet-by-cable for itself. Now, all of a sudden, AOL is a major cable company: it will control Time Warner's cable systems, which serve 13 million customers in 33 states.

AOL impresario Steve Case and his new best friend, Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin, say they're both committed to open access -- and they've now got the juice to pressure AT&T into following suit. Assuming Case and Levin are not just posturing to placate antitrust regulators, that's actually a significant victory for advocates of an open, democratic, high-speed Internet.