Paid Content is reading the giant Lazard report urging the break-up of Time Warner so we don’t have to. Here’s The Times coverage. And Gawker quotes Michael Wolfe’s Vanity Fair column arguing that Time Warner doesn’t have a reason to exist.
In some sense, the best that people can say about Time Warner is it is somehow not like other companies–which are fundamentally about ownership and control. It’s a postmodern entity: the inevitable result of consolidation is that everything is connected in such a tortured and ham-handed way that nothing is quite connected….
No investor, man on the street, politician with his finger in the wind, or employee would tell you differently: Time Warner, along with all the other centralized, vertically integrated, horizontally organized, multi-platform-function media companies, is just too big. The idea of agglomeration without limit turned out not to be such a good one. A no-brainer bad one….
There may be nobody who actually believes in big media anymore.
And this, folks, is why I do not think that media consolidation is an evil ready to eat up the world. Media consolidation makes companies too big and too dumb and the marketplace will take care of them.
I can’t wait to get my proxy to vote on Icahn’s efforts to break up (AOL) Time Warner. I’ll vote yes.
