From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: MM: 10 WORST: TIME WARNER/WHITTLE
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 09:15:25 GMT

[From the Dec 1992 issue of Multinational Monitor.  Subscription info below]

TIME WARNER/WHITTLE SELLING KIDS SHORT

THE $7 BILLION MERGER of media giants Time, Inc. and Warner
Communications in early 1990 marks a significant and dangerous stage
in the drive toward increasing concentration of the media.

Time Warner now owns and controls mass circulation magazines such as
Time and Fortune; publishing houses including Time-Life Books, Warner
Books, Little Brown and the Book-of-the-Month Club; two of the largest
pay-television services in the United States, HBO and Cinemax; two of
the largest cable-operating companies in the United States; music
publishing companies including Warner Brothers, Atlantic and Elektra;
and Warner Brothers Studios in the film industry.

Time Warner owns a 22 percent interest in the Turner Broadcasting
System, the parent company of CNN.  The company has also recently begun
testing a mammoth cable system in Queens, New York to provide a record
150 channels of programming and interactive services such as electronic
banking.  The huge company is entering into joint agreements around
the world to produce movies, open movie theaters, manufacture and market
compact discs and videos, even to develop cable television in Hungary.

The merger of the two companies had the usual effect on the staff:  in
September 1991, Time Warner laid off 600 magazine employees, including
19 of 75 correspondants at Time magazine, according to the New
York-based media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR).  At the same time, Warner chair Steve Ross was the most highly
compensated chief executive in the United States, with a salary and
stock option package worth more than $78 million in 1990.

FAIR executive director Jeff Cohen questions about the ability of Time
Warner employees to report fairly on business in the wake of the merger
and the layoffs.  He says, "You can't expect reporters working at Time
Warner--no matter how valiant--to give working people the information
they need about the dangers of mergers and business monopolies when
they're working for one and they've just seen their colleagues laid
off."  Cohen also notes that as a result of the merger, the company now
both owns cable stations and distributors and produces the product
that will get on the air; Time Warner also owns magazines that review
movies and televisions shows that it produces.  Cohen cites a Time cover
story on author Scott Turow which ran just as Warner released a movie
based on a Turow novel.

Critics of media concentration have more profound concerns about the
mergers of huge companies like Time and Warner, charging that corporate
giants will control the international flow of information to reflect and
promote their own interests, and exist only to exploit information for
profit."Concentrated power to persuade and influence is dangerous," says
Cohen.  "That's a given."

Time Warner has already thrown its muscle behind a particularly
disturbing enterprise to push a noxious mixture of media, education and
commercialism.  In 1992, Time Warner became majority owner of Whittle
Communications, with an option to buy an additional 20 percent of
Christopher Whittle's communications company.  Whittle is the most
blatant and well-known of the new breed of classroom hucksters,
companies that view elementary and high school students as prime targets
for marketing schemes.

Whittle produces Channel One, a television news program beamed daily via
satellite to 6.6 million teenagers in classrooms in over 9,000 high
schools.  In exchange for receiving free satellite dishes, video
equipment and televisions from Whittle, schools agree to air the
12-minute program, two minutes of which consists of commercials hawking
products such as Skittles candy and Nike sneakers.

In January 1991, the National Parents and Teachers Association (PTA)
approved a set of principles to guide state and local education agencies
in their relationships with corporations.  The principles, based on the
recognition that "compulsory education confers on educators an
obligation to protect the welfare of their students and the integrity
of the learning environment," challenged schools' acceptance of Channel
One:  "Selling or providing access to a captive audience in the
classroom for commercial purposes is exploitation and a violation of the
public trust."

Whittle, backed by Time Warner, is currently planning a much more
profound and insidious assault on public schools.  The company's "Edison
Project" is scheming to set up a system of 200 private for-profit
schools by 1996.  Whittle has managed to lure former Yale University
president Benno Schmidt to lead the project, lending it dangerous
credibility.

Karen Brown of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for the Study of
Commercialism says, "We are very wary of a money-making corporation
deciding the curriculum for children.  Clearly, the bottom line for a
company like Whittle may not serve the best interest of U.S. children."

Whittle's current "educational" methods certainly do not bode well for
the type of education the Edison Project may offer.  As Peggy Charren,
president of Action for Children's Television, told the Monitor, if
the Edison Project goes through, classrooms may exist "just to give the
kids a place to sit" while they watch Whittle television.  The Edison
Project may represent "the beginning of the downfall of education in
America," says Charren.

------

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