Media convergence is monopoly by another name

Maybe the good old days of unfair competition legislation really had something

Commentary from Larry Solway

  Boy am I getting old or what?? It came over me that I am doing what my parents my grandparents did to me. I am revisiting the sins of my elders. I am reminiscing, not only about the "good old days" but about how much better things used to be.
  Hopeless.
  I remember when putting a lot of businesses together under one roof for the purpose of having more control over the market was called monopoly building. The more you controlled, the better for business. We used to be squeamish about that stuff. In the U.S. they had the Sherman Anti Trust Act and in Canada we had the Competition Board.
  Then we put a new face on monopoly building: "vertical integration." A rose by any other name... Vertical integration was acquisitions that allowed a company to control upstream and downstream business. They could effectively run everything from the raw material to the finished product. Henry Ford was a whiz at it. He may have started it when he controlled everything from raw iron ore to steel to cars to marketing with a sweetheart deal for Firestone Tires thrown in. The Rockefellers got away with it monopoly until they made them break up the Standard Oil cartel. (Whoops - dirty word.)
  Monopoly, cartel and vertical integration have now morphed into the newest saviour of commerce: convergence. Sounds better than monopoly or cartel. Building a vertically integrated convergence conglomerate, reduces competition. (Somewhere in the back of my silly head is a neo-conservative prattling words about how good competition is.) The whole idea of convergence is to give companies a better "edge" by making sure they have as many tentacles out as possible. Or that they now "have the size to compete globally." As in bigger banks are better. As in TD Bank grows by taking Canada Trust which itself was a conglomerate of long- forgotten Trust Companies. Now they can also dismiss a few thousand redundant employees. That's another advantage of convergence - you can lay people off, as in Global TV reduces staff to compensate for their stock going into the tank and still take over Southam and The Post from His Lordship. (This was before the current Wall Street meltdown.)
  In the business I know best, it has created a new kind of oligopoly. The oligarchs include the Aspers and Can West or Rogers and Mr. Ted who own a lot of cable and TV and radio and of course, newspapers.
  So why am I so exercised? Not just because we are getting media concentration like what successive commissions (Daley and Kent) told us we would get, but that we seem to welcome this new deliverance, this new dispensation, this new millennium. It is good that people who know nothing about newspapers run them. It is great that people who have never had a creative bone in their bodies, much less ever worked as a performer or reporter now run TV and radio.
  No matter. You see the broadcast and publishing industry, is not longer something you do because you have a passion for radio or TV or newspapers, or magazines. The broadcast and publishing industry is what is now called an "asset." Which means it has no value except as a producer of corporate profit.
  So I have become a relic. But not such a relic that when CHUM AM decided brilliantly to exit their over 40 years broadcast format and become the flagship station for a sports network, they called on me and some of my equally atrophied veteran friends to reminisce about what used to be. And we did. What was significant was that we agreed, at least the three of us cataloguing those heady years 1957-63, that at the heart of our success was creativity. We were clever. We were original. We were zany. We were funny. We didn't respond to the dictates of the board room nor to the edicts of consultants. We made stuff up. It worked.
  It is interesting that while the CHUM Limited empire is Canada's major broadcaster, it is almost the only one that has not "converged." Oh there are rumours. CHUM and Torstar. CHUM and Rogers. The corporation, now worth billions, soldiers on alone guided by accountants, consultants, and a few truly creative guys like Moses Znaimer.
  Interesting sidelight: the station put these reminiscences on where they would do the least harm: the graveyard of broadcast Sunday morning at 9 (with a repeat Sunday night at 9.)
  I have awakened to the 21st century reality: we are no longer concerned for the people who read/view/listen to media (with a small bow to those who read E journalism) but we are concerned for the financial health and so-called competitiveness of the companies that own the media and crave to own more. We have developed an entirely new b reed of media moguls. Big business types who acquire media outlets in the name of "convergence". And we call it progress. Talk about Back To The Future.
  Maybe it doesn't really matter since TV is now dominated by "reality" television (Survivor etc.) And pipe dream TV like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
  P.S. The NY Times sports guys report that the Olympic Committee won't be stirred by the now- solved impasse between China and the U.S. over the spy plane controversy. But I was struck by how casually the Times referred to Paris as the runner-up. My advice is: go for 2012 and start now. The money spent to lure the 2008 Olympics should be parlayed now while the betting wicket is still open. Looks like 2008 is a pipe dream.

Now it's your turn:
What do you think of media convergence? Are you getting "straight goods" from your news outlet?

Tell Straight Goods and see what others are saying...

Then Take the Straight Goods poll...

Posted: April 16, 2001

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