Marketplace of Creative Ideas May Now Go to Highest Bidder : Media: As publishers limit themselves to their own writers, everyone who isn’t part of their corporate world is cut off from effective expression.

The recent merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications is part of an alarming trend, the escalating conglomeration of the media.

Time baldly predicted this year in its annual report that “by the mid-1990s, the media-entertainment industry will consist of a handful of vertically integrated worldwide giants. Time Inc. (now Time/Warner) will be one of them.

Recent history and the Time/Warner merger support the prediction. Ten years ago, 50 firms controlled half the U.S. media. Today, 25--including Time/Warner--hold that distinction. Twenty-five giant corporations control at least half the information that shapes American opinions. Time predicts that those corporations will soon control it all.

Time’s report goes on to reveal: “In the media and entertainment business of the future, the winners will own the copyrights to creative products, as well as avenues of distribution. We (Time) intend to increase our ownership of both.”

U.S. and international copyright law says that the free-lance artist who creates a book, an article, a painting or a photograph owns the copyright. A recent Supreme Court case upholding sculptor James Earl Reid’s right to his own work affirms that law.

But Time Inc. wants to own the copyrights. To do so without violating the law, it must rely primarily on its own staff. The problem is that in doing so, it cuts itself off from the larger spectrum of thought. After all, even the largest conglomerate can “own” only a small part of the world’s creative talent, a drop in the pool of ideas.

As magazines and other publishers limit themselves to their own writers, they also cut off from effective expression everyone who is not a part of their corporate world. If this is allowed, the marketplace of ideas that created and sustains our democracy will be jeopardized.

Writers are under constant pressure to conform to the values of the mainstream media. We know what is acceptable to each market and what ideas find few or no markets. We notice that as competition in the media decreases, the market for challenging points of view--for not-yet trends, for questions asked of the status quo--also decreases.

This is only one effect of the increasing imbalance of power between writers and the people who publish their work. It is one of the reasons we have a union. But the problem is not just of concern to writers. If the trend toward media conglomeration continues, everybody loses.

If interlocking ownership turns the diversity of magazines into a boring monoculture, variety is lost. If the industry publishes blockbusters at the expense of quality fiction, literature is lost. If independent newspapers get squeezed out by corporate takeovers, information is lost.

If our press becomes monolithic, then our whole society loses. The United States will become more like regimes on the repressive right or left, countries without freedom of expression. But we Americans will have lost our freedom not to government repression but to monopolistic control, repression by the bottom line.

Or maybe not. The conglomerates may be more flexible than this apocalyptic scenario assumes. For example, the largest bookstore chains, having pulled Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” from their shelves, put it back after the National Writers Union led demonstrations in protest all over the country.

The corporations can be made to listen and respond. But Americans must be prepared to speak to them. You--the consumers of information--must let the corporations know that you support diversity, you want quality, you insist on freedom of expression.