March 3, 2000

A merger here, and a another merger there - THE COMMENTARY

By Joseph Planta

VANCOUVER -- I thought the current choice du jour in our society were boy bands like The Backstreet Boys, or chick singers like Christina something or another, or tit-job Spears. Little did I know that mergers are the biggest thing happening in North America today. First it was Time-Warner swallowing up Turner and Ted Turner, then Time-Warner gobbling up AOL. (Preceeding that Time and Warner decided to hypenate themselves.) Then last week, BCE wants CTV, which was gobbled up Baton about a year and a half ago. In this town, WIC which owns CHEK, CKNW and BCTV, was then absorbed by the tandum of CanWest Global and Shaw.

Mergers in general, aren’t a bad thing. Left-wingers like the NDP are dead set against the concentration of ownership in the media, but I’m inclined to not oppose the concept. Concentration of ownership in the media is only dangerous if the one doing the concentrating, (owning it all) is a dangerous nut. It’s very easy, when one says that to think of Conrad Black. (At the recent NDP Leadership Convention, the anti-Conrad Black rethoric was flowing, ever so leftly.) Conrad Black owns practicially every newspaper in this country and in doing so he’s pissed off a hell of a lot of people who think he’s trumping his own agenda through the plup pages of his papers.

Mergers are not too popular in business and commerce, because the competition tends to think that they’ll get strangled. True, but I think we have to realise that this is business. People have to realise that money comes before everything and that’s the truth that abodes this society, democracy and freedom in this world. Mergers also strangle the workers, the unwashed masses without an ounce of power. That’s true, but not that true when you think of unions. Pro and con, the entire mess has huge opposing sides, sides I might add that have effective arguments.

All in all, I cannot help but think that mergers are all that bad.

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