There's a smell of media mergers in the air. If you feel like you smelled this stink before, you have. The media moguls who want to pad their own wallets and increase their own power over the information you receive are frantically lighting candles to mask the smell.
They're hoping you don't remember how badly this went last time around.
They're hoping regulators don't remember the crushing debt loads that accompany these deals, and the effect that will have on the actual media products. (Ask radio and local television, which have never, and might never recover).
There is at least one analyst who thinks that regulators will have no choice but to block at least one of these deals. Here's a portion of his analysis: "Media consolidation is always unpopular, and all the more so now when merger mania has seemingly run amok and when press attention to Net Neutrality has inflamed distrust. The anti-trust case against any one of the recent spate of mega-deals is perhaps less important than the gestalt... the already-big are getting bigger. The DOJ and/or FCC will be under tremendous pressure to block at least one of the mega-deals lest they be viewed as being asleep at the switch.”
It's too late for the comcast merger. Hopefully it's not too late to stop the madness of News Corp/Time Warner or ATT/Direct TV.
