Just Wait Till The Honeymoon Is Over
Outside of giving Laurence Tisch the dairyman of the year award for successfully milking CBS, there doesn’t seem to be a hyperbole overlooked to characterize the corporate assignations that resulted in the conception last week of two new media empires.
To refer to the couplings of Disney and Capital Cities/ABC and of CBS and Westinghouse as marriages is, of course, an affront to that increasingly quaint institution. On the surface, Disney and Cap Cities have everything going for them. No prom queen and football hero ever started out better recommended for each other. But the CBS-Westinghouse affair has a perverseness that could be its strength. CBS, a once-proud corporate beauty systematically stripped of its finery, is acquired by a heavy manufacturer that owns some broadcasting properties but is primarily recognized as an outfit that used to make a good refrigerator.
Our experience with “perfect” mergers being so often the same as with perfect marriages, the Westinghouse deal may turn out to be a Cinderella. Still, we are so far from the final outcome that speculating on the future shape of the media and entertainment industry, its potential for monopoly, its effect on diversity and quality, remains a fool’s game.
We have to ask ourselves how many companies there are like Westinghouse - down-on-their-luck defense contractors, manufacturers in mature, not to say overripe industries - that will see entertainment as the road to salvation.
Another unknowable is what will happen if players like the Baby Bells and AT&T, communications gatekeepers to 99 percent of American homes, decide that they too are show-business geniuses. And there is the existing cable industry, which could become unrecognizable by the time the telephone sharks and satellite dish barracudas have had their go at its tender underbelly.
Given that the human capacity to communicate and to be entertained is, after all, finite, we must also ask how far the integrated media-communications-entertainment-and-you-name-it industry is from its maturity, from the day when it becomes saturated with underperforming players or joins industries whose days of glory lie behind them. (Railroads, steel, airlines, financial services come to mind.) Never, ever, underestimate corporate America’s ability to carry a fashion-driven, acquisition-crazed trend too far too fast to a logical conclusion that is calamitous.
Pressure on the Michael Eisner wannabes - the Edgar Bronfmans, John Malones, Rupert Murdochs, Ted Turners and Sumner Redstones, rich, driven and pathologically acquisitive - will be intense. With deals of the size and suddenness we saw last week, with so many contenders having egos the size of aircraft carriers, the only thing certain is that when this temporary insanity has run its course, there will be more spectacular losers than recognizable winners.
Theoretically, we stand on the threshold of a historic electronic flowering of knowledge, synergy and creativity. This, however, makes the perilous assumption that by merely grafting the wonders of technology onto the bad taste of market forces we will somehow end up with something better than Hollywood or television has yet produced.