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The Moguls Are the MediumAuthor(s): Laura PetersonSource: Foreign Policy, No. 145 (Nov. - Dec., 2004), pp. 85-86Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4152952 .

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when it lent to Mexico and South Korea, in part because recent recip- ients had larger overall debts. This new class of prolonged users depends on the IMF not because they lack access to private capital, but because fund financing helps them reassure domestic creditors and survive swings in internation- al markets. Without large IMF

loans, these countries could

default. Funds stuck in these nations cannot be lent to other countries, raising concerns that the IMF is facilitating a permanent withdrawal of private credit.

Bird's prescriptions for reduc- ing dependency include helping borrower countries formulate budgets independent of fund assis- tance. But the biggest problem fac- ing potential IMF addicts is often

excessive debt, whether to private creditors or to other governments. Their dependence on the IMF is unlikely to change until their debt falls back to safer levels. Tough love is the right answer in some cases. If the fund wants to prevent a new generation of IMF addicts, it must refuse large bailouts to countries already saddled with unsustainable debt. [H

The Moguls are the Medium By Laura Peterson

Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, No. 5, September 2004, London

t's not easy being Rupert Mur- doch. Over the years the bil- lionaire mogul has become the

poster boy for the evils of media consolidation. With each new addi- tion to his empire, Murdoch's critics grow in size and volume, angrily decrying the insidious danger of one person wielding so much influence over so many. But a CEO as reviled as Murdoch might take comfort in knowing he is just one man in a long history of cable barons. To be sure, these captains of the media industry ruled over a very different kingdom a century ago. But they cut a similar figure in the public imagination: the controlling oligarch holding infor- mation captive.

The cable companies of the mid- 19th century-that is, the telegraph cable companies-were "intercon- nected in a complex series of monopolies and cartel arrange- ments" centered in London. Com- pany officers held stakes in and sat

on the boards of each other's com- panies, pooling resources and quashing compe- tition. This "cable cartel" was an instrument of the British Empire's power and influ- ence. In the 1850s, Britain funded cable companies to ensure priority for government messages, and from the mid-1870s subsidized cable construction to strategically impor- tant areas of the world.

Ownership of telegraph cables, like ownership of the airwaves today, was power. British cartels charged news services such as the Associated Press astronomical prices. Because the British news agency Reuters was able to use the imperial cable system under more favorable terms, it soon became the portal for all foreign news. Even in U.S. territories such as the Philip- pines news from the United States had to pass through Reuters.

The rise of these British syndi- cates sparked the first media reform

movement, which pushed for greater state ownership and regulation of rates. U.S. President Woodrow Wil- son only realized the extent of the problem when a European news agency mangled the translation of one of his speeches. Alarmed by Britain's media juggernaut, Wilson created the Committee of Public Information in 1917 to distribute U.S.-produced news, and he placed Chicago newspaperman and lawyer Walter Rogers at the agency's helm. Like the idealistic media protesters of his day, Rogers believed that affordable cable access would expand peoples' access to information and thereby improve the conduct of states.

Heir to the Kingdom: Murdoch wasn't the first to hold information captive.

Laura Peterson is a staff editor at FOREIGN

POLICY.

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Global Newsstand

Sadly, the world doesn't work that way. Canada-based scholars Robert Pike and Dwayne Winseck, in a recent article appearing in the British journal Media, Culture & Society, offer an impressive histor- ical account of this early moment in media consolidation. They ulti- mately conclude that would-be reformers such as Rogers-or for that matter, today's critics of media conglomerates-fail to grasp the "reality that corporate power, in league with the state, [has] made a mockery of prospects for a demo- cratic global media system." For the authors, media consolidation is not another malefic product of modern globalization. As they point out, the U.S. radio industry subse- quently followed a similar pattern of monopolization in the 1920s. What we are witnessing-then and now-is the ebb and flow of mar- kets, and nothing more.

Pike and Winseck's history les- son ultimately tells us less about today's global media consolidation than about popular anxiety over it. They identify issues of ownership and control, cost, and technological entrenchment as the "cornerstones" of what would become an enduring debate about the politics of global media. The proliferation of news sources through media such as the Internet and cable television have now largely neutralized reformers' concerns about technology-and, to some extent--cost. But fears over ownership still resonate for today's media reformers, who see access to information suppressed by what media critic Ben Bagdikian calls the "Big Five" media companies: Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann.

The authors might argue that this anxiety flies in the face of stud- ies showing that the portion of glob-

al media that multinational compa- nies control remains relatively small. Still, modern critics have a point: The media barons of the 19th cen- tury wielded political power by con- trolling the means of transmitting information-and that's about it. Today's media behemoths control the distribution and content for global news operations their prede- cessors could never have imagined.

Woodrow Wilson did, however, anticipate these tensions. Pike and Winseck note that the Wilson administration understood that the drive to use information technologies could serve either "purely selfish national purposes," or "the equal benefit of all nations and all peo- ple." Substitute the world "nation- al" for "corporate," and those sen- tences could appear in any media watchdog missive today-and sug- gest Wilson wouldn't have liked Rupert Murdoch, either. I-0

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