Six Degrees of America Online

By Michael Kinsley Sunday, Jan. 16, 2000
    • One thing is clear: This is the make-it-or-break-it millennium for AOL Time Warner. By the year 3000, or maybe even sooner, we will have answers to the questions that plague us this week, such as, Can we talk about something else, please? Is synergy the same thing as convergence or something different but equally wonderful? How many more times in the next 1,000 years can the same story be told? Tweedy Time Inc. makes a jazzy marriage (a movie studio! a cable-TV network! an Internet dotcom!), a clash of cultures, a triumph of the new media, the death of the old, etc.? And how many times can Old Media, like an actor at curtain time, rise from the dead, take a bow and prepare to die again in the next performance?

    Above all, Is the agglutination of all telecommunications, media, technology and cinnamon-bun businesses into one sticky, tangled mass a Good Thing or a Bad Thing for everyone besides the three or four white men who have the total power to decide how many times a week Seinfeld will be seen on every single television set on the planet?

    Actually, I have the answers right now. But first, a few disclosures are necessary. Readers have the right to know that TIME magazine will be part of AOL Time Warner. The author of this essay, by contrast, has a day job as editor of Slate, an online magazine published by Microsoft. Microsoft owns an online service, msn, that competes with AOL. Microsoft and AOL Time Warner will have competing investments in the cable industry. On yet another hand, Microsoft and Time Warner are co-investors in a high-speed cable-Internet connection business called Roadrunner. On a fourth hand, Microsoft owns a chunk of AT&T;, which owns a chunk of Time Warner, which means that after the merger, Microsoft will own a chunk of AOL.

    Readers should also take into consideration that Microsoft is a partner with NBC, which is owned by General Electric, in an all-news cable channel, MSNBC, which competes with CNN, which is owned by AOL Time Warner. What's more, the editor in chief of , the cable channel's affiliated website, is my mother's brother's wife's aunt's husband's nephew, which obviously makes it difficult for me to evaluate objectively the merits of a merger between a company (AOL) that recently bought the company (Netscape) that makes the Internet browser that competes with the browser of the company that employs me, and a company (Time Warner) that owns a studio (Warner Bros.) that made the movie Wild Wild West, which I saw on an airplane and which is unforgivable.

    This is mitigated, however, by the fact that GE--again, a partner of Microsoft in MSNBC--is also a partner, with Disney and Hearst (which, along with Dow Jones, owns SmartMoney magazine; more on that later), in A&E;, the Arts & Entertainment cable channel, which is showing a made-for-TV movie starring Jeff Daniels as George Washington, which I haven't seen but which is hard not to hold against these companies anyway. What's worse, GE has direct links, via co-ownership of CNBC, the financial-news cable channel, with Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is a leading cause of heart attacks among sane people.

    But wait. It's not that simple, I'm afraid. CNBC competes directly with CNN/fn, the financial-news cable channel that will be owned by AOL Time Warner. I don't need to spell out the implications of that for you, do I? Well, perhaps I do. Look: this very article you are reading is in a magazine published by a company that owns a cable channel that competes with another cable channel that is half owned by a company (Dow Jones) that also half owns a magazine (SmartMoney) that competes with another magazine (MONEY) owned by the company that publishes this magazine, and half owned by a company (GE) that also half owns a cable channel (MSNBC) that is half owned by the employer of the author of this article, whose CEO (GE's, that is) nevertheless often appears on the cover of the magazine (FORTUNE) that competes with the magazine (SmartMoney) co-owned by the company that also co-owns CNBC with GE.

    Here, then, is the guts of the issue. If Jack Welch of GE, whom I've never met, were nonetheless to appear at my door and say, "I hear you're writing about the AOL-Time Warner merger. I hope you'll keep in mind that I'm CEO of the company that co-owns a cable channel and a website with the company that writes your paycheck, and the company you're writing about owns a magazine that published a damned fine picture of me recently," would I have the ethical backbone to say, "Obviously that occurred to me, but I have no intention of letting it influence me in any way"? Or would I take the coward's way out and say, "Yes, but your company co-owns Talk City, an Internet-content site, with Hearst and Starbucks?" (And while he was puzzling over the relevance of that, I could make my escape.)

    Now you have the information you need to judge my credibility, and we can turn to my analysis of the AOL-Time Warner merger. Or we could if there were room.