Company Town : Something to Wink At : Watchdog Group’s Fliers Decry Media Merger Trend

What’s good for Wall Street may not necessarily be good for democracy.

At least that’s how New York media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting feels about the recent flurry of media mergers in the entertainment business.

The 10-year-old public interest group, which goes by the acronym FAIR, says it is concerned about the recent acquisition of CBS-TV by nuclear-power-plant builder Westinghouse and the purchase of ABC-TV by cartoon-and-theme-park titan Walt Disney.

FAIR also has reservations about media giant Time Warner’s proposed merger with Turner Network’s CNN and weapons manufacturer General Electric’s ownership of NBC.

To protest what FAIR characterizes as the “increasing degradation” of U.S. journalism, the organization hired Los Angeles artist Robbie Conal to create “Winkin’ Blinkin’ Nod.” The sardonic 7-by-14-inch triptych features a winking Peter Jennings, a cross-eyed Tom Brokaw and a sleepy Dan Rather, each delivering his newscast against an ominous backdrop of parent company logos.

Printed on the back of each black-and-white image is a list of the corporations’ assets and holdings and a caption that reads: “Big corporations make big decisions based on big money. Can we count on them to tell the whole story when their vision is focused on the bottom line?”

More than 5,000 fliers were distributed this month throughout Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Washington--more than half of which were inserted at newsstands into copies of such publications as TV Guide, Newsweek, Time and Variety by volunteers who work with Conal.

FAIR Associate Director Hollie Ainbinder said her group also passed out fliers at the headquarters of Disney, Westinghouse and GE.

The organization, which is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Aaron Diamond Foundation, plans to distribute 15,000 more pamphlets next month.

Representatives for Disney, Westinghouse and GE said they had not seen the flier and declined to comment.

“The range of viewpoints in the news gets narrower every year,” Ainbinder said. “Although it appears that Americans have many outlets now to get their news from, the ownership of those outlets has become increasingly more concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations. Journalism is suffering in the process. It’s a frightening trend.”