Jihad vs. McWorld (24 page)

Not really the “hard facts” and not quite a part of our lives, as things turn out. Eileen Orgintz writes in what is presumably intended as high praise (in the
Los Angeles Times)
, “Disney World is an unreal place, and don’t expect reality to intrude. Everyone is happy and well-fed. Everything is clean. Everyone is courteous. Don’t be suspicious. Wait until you get home to feel guilty about all the world’s problems.”
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As once the sun never set on the British empire, so today, Disney can boast, “the fun now follows the sun around the globe.”
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Disneyland in Anaheim, template for all the models that followed, is approaching the half-century mark, Walt Disney World is over twenty years old, Tokyo Disneyland (with its new Splash Mountain), is over ten and in 1992 added another 16 million visitors to its 100 million plus in the nine previous years. Japanese couples are among those that select Disney theme parks for their postmodern nuptials. EuroDisney outside Paris has been the exception to the rule: even if
it avoids becoming the first Disney Bankruptcyland, it will have a hard time denting the tough European market. For Europe is where dreams die; the dreamers have all emigrated to America’s warmer climes. Florida, America’s playground, has been a natural Disney venue: even at a moment when to some wary European tourists it has the feel of Murderland, it holds out the promise of Walt Disney World, the Disney-MGM Studios theme park, Disney’s Dixie Landings Resort and Bonnet Creek Gold Club, the Disney Vacation Club Resort, the Epcot Center, and the projected new Disney town of Celebration. The Disney theme parks around the world earn $3.3 billion of Disney’s annual $7.5 billion a year, with films accounting for another $3.1 billion and consumer products (with theme park and film tie-ins) representing another $1.1 billion. All three divisions of Disney derive inspiration from a single set of cartoon images spun out in endless variations by an Imagineering Department responsible for redefining our reality.

In recent years, the Disney Company has set about virtualizing American history and cartooning its politics. Walt Disney World in Florida recently added Bill Clinton to its popular Hall of Presidents. Like Abraham Lincoln before him, President Clinton has been “imagineered” as an Audio-Animatronic robot who can walk and talk—and unburden himself of some surprisingly terse oratory.
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The company also nearly succeeded in building a “Disney’s America” Civil War theme park at Manassas where America’s bloodiest war was to have been reconsecrated as a pay-per-view spectacle rendered (in accord with the dourly correct realism expected of our times) in all its fratricidal mayhem. Political opposition in Virginia and the District of Columbia along with a national publicity campaign by indignant historians scotched the Manassas venture at the eleventh hour, but the Disney people are still seeking an Americana theme park. For the failed Civil War theme park, “with fake Indian villages, a replica farm, mock Civil War battles and a faux fair” all “within hailing distance of real Indian trails, actual farms, a county fairgrounds and a town that was sacked and burned by Union troops,” was certified by reputable historians.
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Scholars debate the preservationist merits of these new theme parks while the Disney company tries to approximate their exacting standards, but the issue is not preservation and there was something comical about securing
scholastic certification for a virtual reality being raised up right next to the Civil War actuality it was reproducing.

Disney’s creations, however, aspire not to truth but to verisimilitude: the metatruth of virtuality. The whole point of virtual reality is that it is just
like
the reality that it assiduously is not and cannot be. You cannot have sex in Pirate’s Cove or get to Germany on a ride through a Disney Bavarian castle or assassinate Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents. All you can do is buy a ticket to watch: watch without consequences, watch without engagement, watch without responsibility. That is perhaps why Dexter King (Martin Luther King’s youngest son) has met such resistance to his plan to turn his father’s Atlanta memorial into a Disney-like theme park to be known as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Time Machine and Interactive Museum.
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The King family is one thing, but Disney is another; one should not ask Disney to bear a greater burden than the responsibilities of an entertainment company warrant. The company’s aim is innocent enough, even endearing: not reality modification but a few hours or days (or ideally, if its hotels are to remain full, weeks) of escapist relaxation for the tired masses. Theme parks are not just shaping but are being shaped by the larger McWorld whose values they manifest. In one sense, McWorld itself
is
a theme park—a park called Marketland where everything is for sale and someone else is always responsible and there are no common goods or public interests and where everyone is equal as long as they can afford the price of admission and are content to watch and to consume.

McWorld as Marketland is, however, not a natural entity imagineered by some benevolent deity. It is fabricated and it is owned, and how it is owned tells us a great deal about its nature.

T
HE INFOTAINMENT TELESECTOR
is the heart of McWorld and increasingly has the look of a wholly owned subsidiary of a small handful of powerful corporations that, by the month, grow fewer in number and more encompassing in ambition. The concept that drives the new media merger frenzy carries the fashionable name “synergy,” which describes what is supposed to be the cultural creativity and economic productivity that arise out of conglomerating the disparate industries that once, quite separately, controlled all three segments of the infotainment telesector: the software programming, the conduits and pipes that distribute it, and the hardware on which it is displayed. The production companies turning out product, the phone and cable and satellite companies, and the companies manufacturing or controlling television sets and computers and multiplexes all, in McWorld’s ideal economy, belong in the hands of one global company.
Synergy
turns out to be a polite way of saying monopoly. And in the domain of information,
monopoly
is a polite word for uniformity, which is a polite word for virtual censorship—censorship not as a consequence of political choices but as a consequence
of inelastic markets, imperfect competition, and economies of scale—the quest for a single product that can be owned by a single proprietor and sold to every living soul on the planet.

Traditional corporate ambitions that aimed at monopoly within a particular medium have been displaced by the drive for monopoly across media. By the 1990s, according to Bagdikian, seventeen intermedia conglomerates were earning half the total revenues “from all media” including recordings, cable, and videocassettes.
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Conglomeration had reduced the number of players from forty-six in 1981 to twenty-three in 1991, of which a handful are genuinely intermedia.
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Moreover, Bagdikian was describing the situation just before the Japanese buy-in and the very recent erosion of boundaries between telephone, cable, and broadcast transmission that has accelerated the conglomeration process even more radically.

Corporations are aiming at control over each step of the image-making process from source to consumer. Where once an author wrote a book and (perhaps via an agent) sold it to a publisher who then printed it, sold serial rights to an independent magazine, and then found still other independent distributors and booksellers to sell it; and where once the author or agent or publisher marketed it to Hollywood, where an independent film studio bought it and turned it into a film, and then found an autonomous distributor to release it and an independent movie-house owner or chain to show it; and where once the film studio sold rights to an independent broadcaster to show the film on television—so that when the full commercial cycle was completed perhaps a few dozen different independent entities participated in a complex, competitive process to bring a creative work to an extended multimedia public by means that allowed both entry and exit for many different creative and financial forces, and maximized choice and opportunity for cultural creators and cultural consumers alike—today the wonders of synergy permit one entity to control the entire process. Not only is the corporate proprietor of a conglomerate likely to own a stable of publishers, one of which will publish a given book, but it can also own the agency that sells the book, the magazine that serializes it, the movie studio that buys and films it, the distributor that purveys it, the cinema chain that screens it, the video export firm that brings it to the global market, and perhaps even the satellite pods or wires through which it is broadcast
and the television set and VCR on which it is finally screened somewhere in, say, Indonesia or Nigeria. This is not synergy: this is commercial totalitarianism—a single value (profit) and a single owner (the monopoly holder) submerging all distinctions and rendering all choice tenuous and all diversity sham. No wonder even partisan Republicans were nervous about the meeting between Newt Gingrich and Rupert Murdoch. No wonder other critics faulted not just the $4.5 million deal (now set aside) for an unwritten book by the Speaker but the meeting itself.

The process that leads to conglomeration seems natural enough: carriers want to control and profit from what they carry; cultural creators want to control and profit from the entities (stations and networks) that carry what they create; software purveyors want to control and profit from the hardware on which their wares are purveyed. Everyone wants a piece of the creative core, where the “content” that drives everything else is manufactured. Why be a pipe for someone else’s music, when you can own composer and composition alike? But the consequences are to obliterate the conceptual distinctions by which the key elements of this section were sorted out—films, television, books, and theme parks—as government looks passively on. “The idea,” reports
Newsweek
, “is to get a piece of every pie in the business. Sony now brings you Mariah Carey on your Sony Walkman,
Wheel of Fortune
on your Trinitron and
Sleepless in Seattle
in its Loews theaters with Sony sound systems.”
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Or, as Alex J. Mandl (chief executive officer of AT&T’s Communications Services Group) says in explaining AT&T’s $12.6 billion projected buyout of McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. (it didn’t quite come to pass), “we’d like to see the AT&T brand on a national basis. We can offer end-to-end service.”
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The key to it all remains the informational/creative core, the software. In the terse words of Sumner Redstone, “software is the name of the game.”
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The vertical integration of media is a relatively new phenomenon. Bagdikian’s careful record-keeping suggests that most newspapers and magazines remained independent from the end of World War II into the 1970s. The early mergers occurred within sectors, creating newspaper empires, book conglomerates, and movie studio mergers—an unwelcome intrusion of monopoly but one that respected the boundaries separating different kinds of information and entertainment
and that studiously avoided the durable-goods production domains on which spectators and consumers depended. As recently as the 1970s there were hundreds of independent newspaper, magazine, and book publishers each with their own print niche, scores of independent film production studios (and viable film industries in several dozen countries around the world), three big networks along with a large number of independent stations, one nationwide phone company responsible for universal phone service and nothing else, and dozens of hardware companies that produced the durable goods through which the public received the competing soft goods of all the entertainment and information producers—TVs, phone wire, cassette recorders, tuners, computers, and so on.

Yet at the beginning of the eighties, partly in response to the more general merger mania but primarily as a result of ambitious and visionary media empire builders like Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch—their vision was possessive, their ambition absolute—boundaries of every kind were crossed. Mimicking Gulf & Western’s precedent-setting takeover of Paramount back in 1966 for $125 million, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Matsushita, and Sony targeted entertainment companies not simply as another vehicle of diversification but as a way into the ruling house of McWorld’s emerging civilization. By the middle of the 1990s relatively new companies like the Home Shopping Network, Viacom, and Blockbuster Video were engaged in rivalry and reciprocal takeovers and were positioning themselves as the dominant entertainment/selling conglomerates of the new millennium.

This takeover mania began in the early 1980s, with quite literally hundreds of media mergers and buyouts, of which I have listed only a representative sample on the accompanying table of media mergers.

While everyone chatters about synergy, the arrows all point one way: nearly all of the mergers targeted companies controlling creative product, without which neither the hardware manufacturers nor the delivery system owners had anything to show or deliver. Margo L. Vignola, a media analyst at Salomon Brothers, smartly noticed that it was a “paucity of creative talent and product available and an enormous amount of technology chasing it” that ultimately fueled the mania for acquisitions and mergers. Surveying the war between Viacom and QVC for Paramount, she concludes “companies like the regional Bells and cable providers are hobbled by the fact that they don’t have product, and a company that has very mixed results like Paramount becomes the jewel of Madonna. Everyone wants it.”
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