Murdoch Monopolizations

Michael Newcomer  

CNN recently put out an expose detailing how News Corps’ CEO Rupert Murdoch may not be completely out of the running in his bid for Time Warner.

“Combining both companies would have been a dream proposal because the amount of content the combined company would have had would have been tremendous,” Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, who owns stakes in News Corp, Time Warner, and Disney said in the piece.

“Knowing Mr. Murdoch, I think the idea is still in his mind. But I think the time is not right now because the management of Time Warner were against it, and the shareholders of Fox (News Corp) were also not for it”

This is a prime example of the attempted monopolization of American and global media that we read about in McChesney’s “US Media at the Dawn of the 21st Century.”

“The striking structural feature of U.S. media system in the 1990s are concentration and conglomeration.” (16, McChesney)

Given the relaxed attitude of regulation within the past few decades, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Murdoch is still considering a merger of Time Warner with News Corp, despite concerns over conflicts in programming such as CNN (moderate-left news organization) going under the umbrella of a corporation that owns Fox News (right news organization).

If the merger ever is given a second consideration, it may be a boundary-breaker for regulatory departments such as the FCC. While they seem to heavily scrutinize certain telecommunications and radio mergers (i.e. Sirius/XM, T-Mobile/MetroPCS, Alltel/Verizon), there seems to be little scrutiny or media attention given to these massive mergers between an already largely monopolized section of the media. However, I can’t imagine a merger like this going through without some sort of resistance from the public. Conflicts such as CNN/Fox News becoming mutually owned, as well as stations like FX and Adult Swim no longer having to complete in content or advertising could be too much for the FCC and public to ignore.

Given that management and shareholders on both sides of the buyout don’t seem too pleased with the situation, it may be a long while before a merger of that status sees the light of day. However, if a merger as large as this were potentially to be approved, it could open the floodgates to a massive concentration of these media companies as we’ve seen in the telecommunications business. This may ultimately lead to an even further abandonment of the traditional television model to online products, at an even faster rate than has been underway the past few years.

Works Cited:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/21/business/richest-man-in-saudi-arabia/ (The Richest Man in America on Oil, Isis, and Murdoch)
(McChesney, US Media at the Dawn of the 21st Century)