ABSTRACT

Corporate mergers and the consolidation of ownership in the American communications arena have long been sources of concern. The perception of a direct relationship between democracy and a vibrant communications system of diverse sources and owners is near universal (or, at least, is given universal lip-service), as is, for the most part, the converse fear that a communications system which rests in just a few hands will corrupt the freedom of speech, impair the practice of democracy, and impress an ideological pall on society. The Supreme Court’s reasoning in the case of Associated Press v. United States (1945) expresses the issue plainly. In language that has since assumed a kind of talismanic status in discussions about the First Amendment and corporate power, the Court stated the following:

Distrust of government control of media is, of course, an elemental principle of American politics, encoded, among other places, in the First Amendment. But because the press could itself stifle freedom of speech through its business practices (in the Associated Press case, restrictive membership regulations), the First Amendment did not preclude government from applying the antitrust laws to that medium. A few years earlier in 1934, apprehension about private power in the then new medium of broadcasting saw Congress embed within the mandate of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), broadcasting’s new regulatory body, a general command to preserve competition in commerce in the broadcast medium and a specific directive to refuse a station license to any person adjudged guilty of unlawfully monopolizing or attempting unlawfully to monopolize radio communication. Congressional fears of radio’s potentially dangerous concentration of political power in part underlay the Act’s prohibition against any joint ownership of radio and wired systems as reflected in Sections 313 and 314 of the Communications Act (1934). In the period immediately following the second World War, the Commission on Freedom of the Press, probably the most important study of mass media in the United States (conducted by a distinguished group of intellectuals under the leadership of the famed educator, Robert Maynard Hutchins), rearticulated these concerns. Seeing in the ownership patterns of the postwar media system a distinct danger of concentration, the Hutchins Commission worried that such concentration undermined the press’s crucial roles as conveyer of information, government watchdog, and educator (see Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947).1 In recent years, many Americans have become apprehensive as they watch a cascade of mergers among already very large media corporations.