"Conglomeration and Convergence"
May 2000

Conglomeration and convergence play a part in this month’s top stories.

First, conglomeration. The early few days of this month saw a stand off between two of the world’s biggest media conglomerates, Time Warner and Disney, owners of TV network ABC. Cable operators must pay stations for the right to carry their signals. This is known as retransmission consent. But when Disney’s ABC stations could not reach an agreement with Time Warner Cable in seven markets around the country, the cable giant pulled the plug on them. Three and a half million homes were without their ABC stations for 39 hours, when the two companies finally called a two month truce to their dispute.

The stated reason for the dust up may have been the retransmission consent issue, but as is usually the case in today’s world of concentrated media, there was more to the dispute than that. Disney and Time Warner were also fighting over payments to Disney for its cable channels such as the Disney Channel, the Soap Channel, and Disney Toon. Cable operators must compensate Disney for these offerings, but Time Warner argued that Disney was asking far too much; Disney argued that Time Warner wanted to damage it because of its objection to Time Warner’s merger with America Online.

Convergence, specifically in this case that of the Internet with sound recording, was also prominent. Napster (http://www.napster.com) is a software that allows users to virtually visit the hard drives of other Napster users to search for music to be retrieved and downloaded onto the original user’s machine as MP3 (compressed) files. Where Napster sees this as simply allowing people to share music, the recording industry sees it as piracy, costing it millions and millions of dollars.

So, in the first week of this month, heavy metal band Metallica sued the software’s manufacturer, seeking to have the company deny access to more than 350,000 users who it, the band, identified as copying its songs. Few people think this will stop the sharing. Users still interested in sharing Metallica songs can simply change their identification in Napster’s data base. Nonetheless, Metallica’s action was designed to send a message, said its manager Cliff Burnstein. Metallica wanted to let its fans know that file sharing hurts the musicians, not just the record companies. Still, many users, especially Metallica fans, were put off by the move. Rob Jones, creator of the heavy metal web site http://www.KNAC.com, said that Metallica had lost touch with its fans. The band, he claimed, is the Number 1 fan of George Washington (the president on the one dollar bill). They’re just being The Man.

Finally, we revisit low power radio. You read in this space last month that the House of Representatives overwhelming voted to effectively kill the FCC’s plan to award small, 10 to 100 watt stations to community and other non-profit organizations. But two media access interest groups, the Public Media Center and the Media Access Project (http://www.mediaaccess.org), are attempting to mobilize listeners to contact their Senators in Washington, hoping that the fatal bill can be stopped there. They bought a full page ad in the New York Times, asking people to “act now to save America’s last chance for local radio.” If you want to get involved (and you should), visit http://www.lowpowerradio.org.

Follow these three evolving stories on your own over the summer, and I’ll see you next Fall!   

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