In the new issue of the Atlantic, James Fallows ties Rupert Murdoch’s success into the rule-changes at the FCC to predict a dawning era of nakedly political and profit-driven news media.
That he calls this new epoch the Age of Murdoch is less an assignment of blame than a description of fact. Murdoch’s model — the brazen multi-continent media empire — is the one that’s worked, Fallows says, and to keep up with News Corp., his competitors are going to have to play copy-cat.
It’s also, perhaps, an acknowledgment of the part Murdoch has come to play in the media: He’s the poster child for corporate consolidation. Fallows spends a bit of time discussing that image, and to this Convergence Chaser’s mind, it’s the most interesting part of his piece. Read on:
A few days before the FCC vote the liberal groups MoveOn.org, Common Cause, and Free Press organized a nationwide ad campaign to protest the likely result. A full-page ad ran in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other papers. The ad showed four TV screens, representing coverage on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, and on each screen was the same glowering picture of Rupert Murdoch, looking like Big Brother. “THIS MAN WANTS TO CONTROL THE NEWS IN AMERICA,” the large-type headline said. “THE FCC WANTS TO HELP HIM.” Chellie Pingree, the recently chosen president of Common Cause, told The New York Times, “He is the poster child of media consolidation. Who better to personify what the trends are than Rupert Murdoch?”Yes, what would it be like? Fallows doesn’t answer, launching instead into some material about Murdoch’s managerial style. It’s interesting — but this Convergence Chaser wants to know about the future, man!
I talked with a News Corp official the morning the ad came out. He was exasperated by it and by the “poster child” quotation. News Corp was just a small player, he said. It had always stood for shaking up the status quo. And anyway, it didn’t care about the FCC vote. Gary Ginsberg, a senior News Corp official, said to The New York Times in responding to the ads, “The reality is that in the past two decades no company has brought greater choice, unlocked more monopolies and invigorated more stagnant media markets than News Corporation.”
Still, Pingree had a point — less about Murdoch than about the world around him. By example and by competitive threat, Murdoch was showing other companies the way ahead. What would it be like?
Fallows returns to the question later, but his predictions are sketchy: more media mergers, maybe, and more openly political news outlets, probably.
But in the end, it’s all a little confusing — perhaps because, well, this stuff is all a little confusing. We’ll have to wait and see what the Age of Murdoch holds. In the mean time, Fallows writes it up in fun, floppy Atlantic style, with more than a few interesting digressions along the way. Check it out.
