Are You Longing for Those Old Rabbit Ears?

If H.L. Mencken were alive today, he surely would have laughed off the recent tiff between Time Warner and the Walt Disney Co. So several million people--in places including L.A., New York City, Houston, Philadelphia, Raleigh-Durham and the suburbs of Milwaukee--could not get ABC for some two days because of a contract dispute. Was this a cultural tragedy?

What was it that those viewers couldn’t watch, once the cable giant dropped the Disney signal? For those two ABC-less days, New York’s cable viewers (for example) were unable to watch Oprah, Rosie, Regis or Kathy Lee, or Regis again on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”. They didn’t get to see the local news on ABC. They missed “The View.” Such deprivation Mencken would have jeered, and no doubt brilliantly, having lots of bitter fun with the inanities of Regis and the trivialities of Disney’s local TV news. And Mencken would have had a point. But it’s also useful to remember that the Sage of Baltimore was not a big believer in democracy--and as we think about the implications of the recent fight between those corporate superpowers, it is the welfare of democracy itself that should concern us most of all.

However high or low the quality of what those many cable viewers couldn’t see, the event itself was most instructive, for it told all the world that the media giants could not care less about the public.

Time Warner’s bald indifference to the sentiments of some 4 million paying customers was pretty striking, and a valuable reminder of the buyer’s weakness under a monopoly. Those blinded cable viewers had no recourse other than to try to reconnect the rabbit ears or buy themselves a satellite dish. Certainly they couldn’t simply switch their service to another carrier, because there is none. All cable viewers--whichever giant outfit hooks them up--know that their cable company has them right where it wants them. By blithely yanking ABC, Time Warner’s managers told us that they know it, too.

Having unilaterally pulled the plug, those managers then lied about the move as brazenly as they had made it: “Disney Has Taken ABC Away From You,” Time Warner said in large letters across that bare TV screen where Regis or Oprah ought to have been frisking. As corporate propaganda goes, that mendacious stroke was pretty crude, the sort of outright falsehood that we might expect from the state broadcasters in Iraq or Serbia.

If Time Warner acts this way now, how will it behave once it has merged formally with AOL? It’s bad enough that it controls the cable market all over the United States. It’s likely to be even worse if it’s allowed to hunker down in cyberspace, where--once TV and our computers have converged--Time Warner then might be equipped to censor every electronic signal that comes coursing through your home. Imagine if that corporation could wield veto power not only over this or that TV channel in some markets, but over all the cybertraffic on the Information Superhighway.

Disney tried to make that very point, in stark newspaper ads that ran on Tuesday. “When Time Warner illegally dropped ABC, they violated your trust as a viewer,” yelled the headline of Disney’s ad in major newspapers. The tone was wrathful and alarmist--and bizarrely populist: “Only an arrogant monopolist would drop its most popular channel,” the ad said, to “retaliate against ABC for raising questions about [Time Warner’s] stranglehold over your television, cable and Internet access.” Time Warner’s actions were indeed outrageous--and so was this complaint, with Disney trying, hypocritically, to warn of the perils of excessive corporate power. (The ad’s claim was simply false, moreover, since it wasn’t Disney’s “questions about Time Warner’s stranglehold” that caused the latter to pull ABC, but a fierce dispute over the fee that Disney wanted from Time Warner Cable for the right to air the Disney Channel.) Disney is in no position to decry corporate violations of the people’s right to know: Last year the parent company won jeers for pressuring ABC News to kill Brian Ross’ “20/20” story on the pedophiles at work in Disney’s theme parks.

And then there’s Time Warner’s potential “stranglehold over Internet access.” That’s a just concern, but not on Disney’s part, since GO!--the search engine that Disney owns--will not allow you to approach, or even know about, the sites of DisneySucks.com or the Society of Disney Haters or the Disney Hate page. Of course, DisneySucks.com may not be the classiest locale in cyberspace; but that’s neither here nor there, according to the Bill of Rights.

And in any case, since when is Disney’s product so impressive? Like all its giant peers, that many-tentacled concern has also overwhelmed us with a lot of trash. It’s the kind of stuff that Mencken would be jeering at today.

Just like Time Warner, Disney mainly takes the low road, and makes a bundle doing it, despite its legal obligation to respect “the public interest” as a necessary precondition for its access to our airwaves. If you want to know how seriously Disney takes that grave responsibility, Disney’s WABC has defined the following as public service broadcasts: Barbara Walters’ pre-Oscar special, “Oprah!” and an episode of “Inside Hollywood.” As children’s programming, the station listed “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” and “101 Dalmatians,” which is a Disney product.

Disney, of course, is not alone in such self-serving ways. New York’s Fox affiliate listed “Beverly Hills 90210” as public service programming because it teaches kids about “social class in Beverly Hills.”

All the media giants work that way, because they’re all fixated on the bottom line, which is, after all, their purpose. As they must, they honor their shareholders and therefore abuse the rest of us, trying to do well at our expense. And that’s the problem, finally, that the public relations folks at Disney had the corporate chutzpah to deplore: the great commercial “stranglehold,” about which we should all be “raising questions.”