The trouble with big media mergers like AOL-Time Warner is that the public can never be sure of the answers to such questions. Even if the decision to halt work on the story had absolutely nothing to do with Disney’s ownership, as ABC argues, there’s the possibility of a shadow of suspicion. And the bigger the merger, the bigger the potential complications. Now any article that a Time Warner magazine runs on Steve Case or AOL–no matter how skillfully executed–may appear under a question mark. If the article is friendly, it could raise eyebrows. If the article is hostile, it could give rise to speculation about corporate infighting. A magazine run by people of talent and integrity risks losing either way.
This problem isn’t new. Time magazine put the Warner Bros. movie “Eyes Wide Shut” on its cover. CNBC analyzes the stock performance of its corporate parent, General Electric. NEWSWEEK has fewer corporate complications, but a cover story appeared last year on test prep (Kaplan Educational Services, like NEWSWEEK, is owned by The Washington Post Company). In these and hundreds of other cases, the stories would probably have turned out the same, but there’s no way to know.
It’s like the Sherlock Holmes story of the dog that didn’t bark. The clues are in what does not happen. Citizen Case may now be a news magnate, but it’s hard to imagine he’ll micromanage stories in Sports Illustrated. The real problem isn’t a corporate honcho ordering up a synergistic story but self-censorship–reporters and editors who know which side their bread is buttered on and are therefore less aggressive and critical. Or reporters and editors who want to prove their independence and so are overly aggressive and critical. As conglomerates grow, journalism becomes a smaller part of what they do. That means that journalistic values get increasingly subordinated to the business values of the parent company. There is no evidence yet that better journalism results from these combinations. “As a reader, one might like the work of Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth,” media critics Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach wrote in The New York Times. “That doesn’t mean the book they wrote together would be twice as good.” But it might sell more.
