Slashdot Mirror
AOL + Time-Warner Worse Than Microsoft?
A quote from the OJR article: "Never in the history of news publishing has one company held such extensive power over what we see and hear as does AOL in the wake of the Time-Warner deal."
Have you looked at AOL's main page lately? I don't mean the one at aol.com, but the one AOL members see when they log on. If you're a Linux user, the answer is obviously "no" unless you borrow a friend's computer (and AOL account), because AOL doesn't allow Linux folks to access their system. Like blind people, we're pariahs in AOL-land. Remember that AOL boasts about their "exclusive content" constantly; I saw yet another TV commercial last night that told me this. Like it or not, AOL has become as vital a part of modern American culture as Judge Judy, and it might be nice to check in now and then to see what kind of online experience AOL's (claimed) 22 million users are getting. It's sad that I can't do this unless I choose to use a proprietary operating system, which I don't.
But I'm far more worried about the Time-Warner side of the business than I am about AOL's willingness to exclude Linux users, handicapped people, and others who don't fit into their mass-market mold. Talk about a machine to influence public opinion! Movies, books, CNN, music, a bunch of influential magazines, cable TV systems all over the country! In his day, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was considered by many to be more powerful than the U.S. president, and he didn't have a fraction of the information control Time-Warner has now.
It's easy to forget that Slashdot is a niche Web site with comparatively few readers by AOL/Time-Warner standards. Wired, Salon, Slate, and CNN.com all claim more readers than Slashdot. So do The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USAToday, and every single one of Time-Warner's magazines. More people are interested in celebrity gossip (People magazine's stock in trade) than in news about Open Source Software and ever-faster microprocessors. Time covers events that are interesting to more people than new game releases for Linux. An interview with someone like Leon Lederman or Steve Wozniak may be hot stuff to you and me, but the overwhelming majority of the world's population would rather read about Bill Clinton or Leonardo DiCaprio. Indeed, I doubt that a statistically significant percentage of Americans -- let alone citizens of other countries -- have even heard of most of the people we mention on Slashdot. And this is why Slashdot would never have grown and prospered under Time-Warner's thumb.
The section of Time-Warner's online empire for which I used to write was Netly News, the company's attempt to put out a WWW publication aimed at "hip" Internet users instead of at the general public. It got about 100,000 steady readers, which was not bad back in the "old" 'net-days of 1996 and 1997. But 100,000 readers was a tiny number in Time-Warner's eyes. Josh Quittner and Noah Robischon, who ran Netly News back then, never could get Time's marketing and ad sales people interested in promoting their little publication because Time's business people were used to readerships measured in round millions, not in thousands or hundreds of thousands. So Time decided Netly was a failure and let it die a quiet death in early 1998, not out of ideological concerns but because it simply wasn't popular enough to meet their "success" criteria.
My personal fear of giant corporate voices controlling the Internet as a news medium is based not only on their potential political influence, but also on their ability to stifle innovation online. Do you think Rob Malda and Jeff Bates would ever have been allowed to do their schtick on AOL or through Time-Warner? Would Time-Warner have tolerated -- let alone supported -- freshmeat? What about other sites that cover Linux and Open Source news, like Linux Today, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, and all the rest? What about even smaller, more "niche" sites like osOpinion, Technocrat.net, and 32bitsonline.com?
All of these sites, put together, don't attract enough readers to get a Time ad salesperson interested in actively marketing them. In Time's world, ad campaigns start at the $100,000 level and go up from there, and it really takes $1 million or more to get Time's corporate ears to perk up in any significant way. Web publishing, on the AOL/Time-Warner level, is like music or movies; they are interested in producing big hits and only big hits, and anything they don't feel they can make into a million-seller is going to be ignored.
It is true that AOL and Time-Warner will probably never be able to control the Web's content as tightly as Microsoft controls the desktop operating system market. But by making "their" information easier to find and access than information "they" don't control, and adding in the cross-promotion potential available to a company that has interests in everything from movie production to chat servers, within the next few years we could easily see a world where 95% of all Web users only access 5% of everything that's potentially available online. And if that 5% is controlled by a single giant, mass-market media conglomerate -- or even by two or three like-thinking, mass-market conglomerates -- the next generation of bright youngsters who have innovative Web site ideas will never get a chance to build a Slashdot-style following, no matter what operating system they use.
If there's one thing you can count on Slashdot to be, it's elitist. All of us like to think we're so much better than anyone else it makes me sick. Some sample /. reactions to articles:
article about GNOME/KDE: "If they can't figure out a command line every once in a while, why should they be using Linux? And do they really even need a computer?"
article about the US: "Well, screw the US anyway. They're stupid and backwards and Europe's so much better and thank God I don't live there any more. Too many idiots."
anything by Jon Katz: "SHUT UP! YOU SUCK! But you're right that geeks are fundamentally better than everyone else and are persecuted for it."
Add this to the fundamentally Libertarian / Objectivist / "if things were fair I'd be at the top of the heap because I'm better than most people" attitude and the rampant bragging about IQ's (you know who you are, all of you "my IQ is 160+" people) in any story that talks about intelligence, and you've got one hell of a scary picture.
If this is how the people who run the information technology that our society depends on feel, how humane can we count on them being? I, personally, wouldn't trust the Slashdot community further than I could throw it.
The 'net will never be totally consumed by corporate media.
Unless the corporate media buy all the major search engines on the 'net.
And even if they did, new ones would crop up.
You see, the vast majority of WWW users surf. They type phrases into search engines, and click on the results. As long as someone will be able to see slashdot.org, or my site, or some other independent site, we'll exist, and more people will publish independent sites.
Yes, the number of non-savvy folks out there who never even make it past the front page/portal/AOL experience will never see us, but that's okay.
If part of being independent IS being independent, we don't need EVERYONE, especially all the newbies, tuning in anyway.
Just my 2 cents.
I don't buy this for a second. How many sources of media and news did people then have compared to now? I would argue that they have _many_ more now.
Without a doubt many more publications under many new names are available to the consuming public today than previously. However, if one checks the corporate ownership of these various publications one notices a single fact about almost all: they are almost all owned by as few as nine media conglomerates, worldwide. From FAIR's webpage (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) here are several sources for this assertion:
- The Global Media Giants: The nine firms that dominate the world
- Corporate Ownership Matters: The Case of NBC"
- Media Monopoly: Long History, Short Memories -- ABC Was Born Out of Fear of Media Consolidation"
This is only a few links from The Corporate Ownership page, which was itself a link from the primary Media Woes page, containing links to discussions on the limited range of acceptable debate (something Noam Chompsky wrote a whole book about, see: Manufacturing Consent), significant advertiser and corporate ownership influence, manipulation of debate by pressure groups, and PR as news (how simple corporate press releases get prime news coverage without even basic fact checking).The news media is an absolute mess... and frankly if it were not for the net I think we should expect even greater limitations in the range of acceptable debate and discourse throughout society. The net threatens the media conglomerates because it allows individuals to shift the debate not only away from what's acceptable to the power elite, but even worse: away from advertising influence, which is the whole point behind a unified corporate media -- shove those ads down our throats and get us to buy crap we wouldn't otherwise even consider. For this reason it's reasonable to fear a Time Warner/AOL merger simply because it represents not just more media power consolidating into fewer conglomerate corporations, but because it represents the largest ISP merging with one of the largest Media Conglomerates. If they succeed in controlling the individual expression of users and content distributors while monopolizing Internet access they will succeed in stripping the Internet of it's primary benefit to society at large.
I note that without organizations like FAIR, and a free press unhindered by corporate pressure, advertising pressure, and government pressure no one would know about stories like this: Government Psychological Warfare operatives work as interns at CNN News, and thus no one would have forced CNN to explain themselves with this statement. That's right, our government had five PSYOPS personel working directly in CNN's Newsroom and NOT A SINGLE PRIMARY NEWS OUTLET HAS EVER PUBLISHED THIS STORY!
Pretty scary, huh?
There are currently two trends with respect to media companies, consolidation and fragmentation.
AOL-TW is just one of a number of mergers. Yet at the same time we see the barriers to entery droping. /. was started and run by a couple of guys in college. Digital video is lowering the cost of moving making (think Blair Witch). Internet radio has lower start up and running costs than traditional radio, and no frequency constraints. MP3s and such allow musicians to cut out the RIAA middle men.
Speaking of the RIAA, as /. readers are well aware, they and the MPAA are fighting very hard to maintain the status quo.
This combination of fragmentation and consoidation can be seen in a number of areas. Newspaper reading continues to decline while web surfing is increasing. Network TV viewing is down, cable viewing is up. Yet TV networks are seen as valuable properties. And newspaper companies are investing in other newspapers, while providing free web access. A curious allocation of resources.
It will be interesting to see how these two trends play out. I'm routing for fragmentation and choice.
That said the problems of consolidation are real. Here in the US (and I suspect in most democracies) public opinion does matter. And the fact that AOL-TW controls and/or can influence where people get their info frightens me.
In addition to the problems associated with the large media conglomerates controling the access to and the content of information I see two other problems.
The first has to do with self censorship by reporters and journalists. While big the big names will be able to resist pressure to toe the company line, it could be a different story for the unknowns with no reputation to protect them. Consider a reporter just out of journalism school, with a family to support, a mortage to pay off, student loans, etc. Writing or even pursuing a story unflattering to the corporate parent could be seen as career suicide. So they don't, rationalizing that their new baby is more important then a story. Soon these stories never even reach concious awareness.
No one told this reporter not to persue these stories. But perceived self interest leads to self censorship.
The second problem has to do with perceived conflicts of interest. If Time has a story about AOL, would you believe it? (How about if Microsft commissions a poll about Windows?) If it is flattering then the fix is in. If it is unflattering it's just Time trying to show its independence. Either way the motives are suspect.
Finally these mega mergers lead to a very bland media landscape, since as noted by Roblimo they are going after mass markets. Has anyone noticed how similar the news shows on the networks are. Not just the nightly news but the news magazines and the morning shows as well. How many mob shows are on tap now that The Sopranos is a hit? How many Mars movies are out or in production? And where are all the fresh new musical acts? As an information and entertainment consumer I am very much pro choice.
I've rambled on long enough, and I'll leave it to someone else to explore the problems of a fragmented media landscape.
Steve M
>In his day, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was considered by many to be more powerful than the U.S. President, and he didn't have a fraction of the information control Time-Warner has now...
I don't buy this for a second. How many sources of media and news did people then have compared to now? I would argue that they have _many_ more now.
>My personal fear of giant corporate voices controlling the Internet as a news medium is based not only on their potential political influence, but also on their ability to stifle innovation online. Do you think Rob Malda and Jeff Bates would ever have been allowed to do their schtick on AOL or through Time-Warner?
No, but who says they have to? Just because AOL/TW has huge market share doesn't mean that small, independent, special-interest sites can't become successful. In fact, one could argue that AOL is contributing to their success by getting millions of users onto the net who would never have been there before.
>The section of Time-Warner's online empire for which I used to write was Netly News...
Here's a question: Did TW ever try and influence how _you_ wrote your articles? Just because AOL owns CNN doesn't mean they can dictate what the reporters say and do, for the most part. I would argue that the integrity of Wolf Blitzer, Christian Amanpour, etc. will not be changed, and that if some corporation tried to control how they did their job they would scream bloody murder. (Of course, there are exceptions; reporters can be pressured into which stories to write, news can be edited to give it a slant, etc. etc. One example I can think of is the whole 60 Minutes/Tobacco story recently made famous in The Insider. But note that what happened: The producer stood up for what was ethically [in his profession] right to do, and CBS had some serious egg on their faces, and they suffered for it.)
This article strikes me as sort of Jon Katz-ish, the world is coming to an end, oh-my Big-Brother article. I don't buy any of it. If I don't like the way CNN is reporting, I'll change the channel. I guarantee you that CNN and NBC/CBS/ABC/etc. aren't all conspiring with AOL.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
You would almost think it is impossible for anyone to control all the quality content on the web. After all... when a million monkeys at a million keyboards can make a million websites (http://www.geocities.com), why would people need to stick to the big sites?
Oh... Quality content. That means stuff that people want to read, right?
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Following line: Good example of Fair Use.
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Have you ever noticed that people are always warning about the *prospect* of a monopoly, rather than the reality?
There *are* real monopolies. Electric companies, local telcos, cable companies. And they're all granted their monoplies by virtue of legislative action. And these monoploies, which were established under the pretext of maintaining market order, are the most durable of all.
Thanks for your concern, but no thanks for your help. We the market can cut these folks down to size without your help.
I live in an area where Time Warner is our current monopoly for Cable access ... In 2 months they have announced that they will have Cable Modem access available in our area... I asked a representitive of the company about this and how it could be used on other platforms .... they replied to me "You will be able to have cable access on many platforms, Linux, Windows, even OS/2, you will not be required to use AOL's interface either" this is good news In my opinion, I beleive it is a step in the right direction for Time Warner/AOL whereas AOL can offer Cable Access through Time Warner for those that are not as 'enlightened' as we are, and Time Warner can offer Cable access directly without having to run it through AOL's interface, or even having to come from an AOL address.
DaiTengu
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Damage Inc. BBS