The typical media report about media conglomeration is supercharged with the rhetoric of the conglomerates themselves. Fusing a business story with a celebrity story, it stresses the glamour of deal-making and the size, complexity and hypothetical synergy of the composite firm.
Stock analysts opine that the latest move of the week is somebody's coup.
The journalism of the awe-filled room is usually too busy to ask what these immense mergers and acquisitions mean for Americanthat is, worldculture. That's not the beat of the breathless chronicler. Nor are the prognosticators called to account for their previous financial projections, the ones that misfired. Meanwhile, critics of the conglomeration juggernaut stress the danger of censorship. In television, there are a few reported cases, enough to worry about, though the argument as usually presented is not rigorous enough.