One of the two biggest media stories of the summer was the unexpected takeover by the Walt Disney Company of Capital Cities/ABC for $19 billion. The announcement, which came on July 31, upstaged an announcement the next day of Westinghouse’s agreement to purchase CBS for an embarrassingly smaller amount of money. Although ABC has been in the entertainment business for as long as it has existed as a network, there seemed to many journalists something sinister and vaguely threatening to the seriousness and gravitas of ABC’s widely respected news operations in the network’s being owned by a corporate entity as essentially trivial as “The Mouse.”
Benjamin R. Barber, a political scientist at Rutgers, for example, worried on the op-ed page of The New York Times that “the distinctions between information and entertainment, software and hardware, product and distribution are fading fast anyway,” and that the corporate “synergy” prized in mergers like Disney/ABC is really “just another word for monopoly.” Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, also got onto the op-ed page to complain that “ABC’s news division will now have to compete with the enormous energy of Disney’s entertainment productions in a company in which ABC’s value as an outlet for entertainment is paramount.”
More often, however, Disney’s shrewdness in snapping up $19 billion worth of synergy earned a certain grudging admiration from the likes of Richard Turner in New Yorkmagazine and Ken Auletta
