Seeking Ownership of Both the Information and the Superhighway

[Commentary] On the face of it, there is something Strangelovian about the proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner.

A company that controls the signal to the wireless devices of more than 130 million people, and to televisions in some 25 million households, buys a major movie studio and one of the biggest collections of cable channels in the country — potentially attaining a dominant position from which to control the information flow to a large percentage of Americans. A cultural-political Doomsday Machine is born. Mass media hegemony, or some such, follows. Or does it? Like a lot of news consumers, I’ve been struggling to get my head around this deal, which would give AT&T control of the Warner Bros. movie studio and cable networks including CNN, HBO and TBS. It would be gargantuan, carrying an $85 billion price tag. And it would further concentrate media ownership into a few powerful hands, playing to fears of a big corporate media takeover of the wild and woolly web, which has been so central to this year’s great political upheaval. But it’s all very fuzzy.

What is it about this proposed merger that has both the left and the right, on the presidential trail and on Capitol Hill, so suspicious of it, if not downright opposed? Are the stakes really so high and the potential damage so great?

“When the company that controls the pipes, so to speak, owns this very, very large content provider, it can cause a whole bunch of different horribles for consumers,” said Sen Al Franken (D-MN).