Bill? Is that you?

Okay, you writing in the February 16 New York Times, who are you really and what have you done with William Safire?

[C]onsider how a supine Congress and a feckless majority of the Federal Communications Commission have been failing to protect our access to a variety of news, views and entertainment.

The media giant known as Viacom-CBS-MTV just showed us how it controls both content and communication of the sexiest Super Bowl. The five other big sisters that now bestride the world are (1) Murdoch-FoxTV-HarperCollins-WeeklyStandard-NewYorkPost-LondonTimes-DirecTV; (2) G.E.-NBC-Universal-Vivendi; (3) Time-Warner-CNN-AOL; (4) Disney-ABC-ESPN; and (5) the biggest cable company, Comcast.

Our Safire doppelganger notes that Comcast has moved in a $50 billion deal to take over Disney and predicts that if it comes to pass that Rupert Murdoch will move to suck up the Time-Warner combo and Microsoft, "which already owns 7% of Comcast and is a partner of G.E.'s MSNBC" would swallow both Comcast-Disney and G.E.-NBC. "Then there would be three, on the way to one."

You say the U.S. government would never allow that? The Horatius lollygagging at the bridge is the F.C.C.'s Michael Powell, who never met a merger he didn't like. Cowering next to him is General Roundheels at the Bush Justice Department's Pro-Trust Division, which last year waved through Murdoch's takeover of DirecTV. ...

[Senator John] McCain's plaintive question to Powell - "Where will it all end?" - is too little, too late. This senatorial apostle of deregulation, who last week called the world's attention to the media concentration that helps subvert democracy in Russia, has been blind to the danger of headlong concentration of media power in America. ...

How are the media covering their contraction? (I still construe the word "media" as plural in hopes that McCain will get off his duff and Bush will awaken.) Much of the coverage is "gee-whiz, which personality will be top dog, which investors will profit and which giant will go bust?" ...

You don't have to be a populist to want to stop this rush by ever-fewer entities to dominate both the content and the conduit of what we see and hear and write and say.

Damn.

I suppose it might also be said of Safire that he comes too little, too late, but I'd rather hold out some hope that if media concentration has become so big, so obvious, and so ominous that even conservatives are noticing, there might yet be some way found to stop the juggernaut. Certainly the public respone to last spring's attempt by the FCC to allow even more control, a battle in which, ultimately, the Murdochs of the media got something less than half of what they wanted (which is half less than they're used to getting) lifted a few spirits.

Someone who has been on this beat for 20 years is Ben Bagdikian, whose book The Media Monopoly has gone through six editions - and in every one, the number of corporations controlling a majority of US media has shrunk - from fifty in 1983 to five in 2000.

His new book, The New Media Monopoly is to be published in May. Buy it, read it.

Letting a maximum number of views be heard regularly is not just a nice philosophical notion. It is the best way any society has yet discovered to detect maladjustments quickly, to correct injustices, and to discover new ways to meet our continuing stream of novel problems that rise in a changing environment. - Ben Bagdikian