PERSPECTIVE ON TELEVISION : Mickey Moused Media : Disney’s hands on ABC will mean the increasing juvenilization of the news, putting fun over information.

Dear Mickey:

The Wall Street crowd may have its own reasons to be cheering your purchase of Capital Cities/ABC, and your friends all over broadcasting are also happy to know that over-the-air networks have not yet gone the way of the dinosaurs. But Mickey, you know that a mouse shouldn’t surround himself with yes-men, so let me give you a little sharp cheese here. From a cultural perspective, the Disney Co. acquisition of the American Broadcasting Co. has a dark side.

First, have you noticed that at the very time that the private sector is booming in Anaheim, the public weal of Orange County has gone down the tubes? What this means is, as a culture we’ve turned our backs on collective responsibility. Remember, ABC was split off from NBC at a time when the public--and the courts--felt that too much concentration of media power was a bad thing, injurious to competition. That’s all changed now. Who cares about the public good? Remember that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was likewise founded when we felt that collective action was important for the health of the culture; now we can barely spare public television from the congressional ax.

Disneyland can flourish while Orange County goes bust because we’ve forgotten, Mickey, the importance of pitching in. We’re quick to defend our American liberties all too well--witness Waco--but we can’t seem to remember the responsibilities that require us to act collectively. So you go ahead and start making money from the advertising you’ll be airing on ABC, but please don’t forget to give something back by reminding us that we need to act together sometime.

Wall Street’s quick take on your new toy, ABC, is that Disney, a “content provider,” is hooking up with a means of over-the-air distribution. It’s as if a dairy farmer had gone out and bought a company of milkmen and trucks to get his milk to your doorstep. But there are more interesting issues here, under the heading of what you might call cultural evolution. Although Walt Disney himself never claimed that his studio’s animated movies were meant only for children, still the Disney name is rightly associated with children’s bright eyes. When you, Mickey, take over the biggest news organization on the air, it’s one more step in the progressive juvenilization of our culture. If the Sorcerer’s Apprentice runs the show, we’ll have your little robot brooms running everywhere.

Should the Disney Co. be in the news business? Its success with award-winning news on Los Angeles’ KCAL, Channel 9, suggests you were just clearing your throat before stepping up to ABC’s global megaphone. But does this acquisition-disguised-as-a-merger mean that Disney wants to get into the business of informing people about the real world? Not if you listened to a singularly revealing moment in the almost giddy news conference held by Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Thomas Murphy of Capital Cities/ABC. Eisner said: “There’s obviously a synergy of putting ESPN (an ABC property) and the Disney Channel together around the world, and there are many places in the world, like China, India and other places, that do not want to accept programming that has political content. But they have no problem with sports and they have no problem with the Disney kind of programming. The leverage of those two together in what used to be Third world countries, or closed countries, is enormous. There are 250 million people in the middle class in India alone, which is an enormous opportunity . . . .”

What Eisner calls “political” programming is what others might call reality. It’s informing the population and equipping it to make decisions collectively and it has just lost out again to fun and games. This is what scholars call the “ludic” wing of culture, Mickey--that is, the game-playing impulse--and it’s just won out again over the realistic or informative wing.

When the moguls of Buena Vista Street in Burbank and the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan sit down to horse-trade like this, what they’re buying and selling, really, is our attention. Disney has its own premium cable channel, of course, but that does not carry commercials. Mickey, you’ve been selling us nothing but Mickey--but now, with ABC under your belt, you can start selling our attention to the purveyors of antacids, adult diapers, beer and all the rest. Walt’s company makes world-class “eye glue,” and it just bought itself a worldwide supply of glue applicators.

So there’s your box score in this deal, Mickey. The private sector thrives while the public coffers run empty; the juvenile sets the tone for the culture, and the escapism of fun and games wins a shut-out over the business of information. Happy days are here again.