A Whole New World

So much for Pirates of the Caribbean. For embattled Walt Disney Co., it’s now about pirates from the cable television industry who threaten to storm the Magic Kingdom and, quite possibly, bring an abrupt end to embattled Disney Chairman Michael D. Eisner’s two-decade reign.

Los Angeles is full of people who work for Disney, used to work for Disney or spend a lot of money on Disney -- so Comcast’s audacious bid for the home-grown company makes for compelling theater on many levels. A week ago, Eisner’s focus was on stamping out the palace revolt led by Roy Disney, a former company director and nephew of company founder Walt Disney. Now an upstart cable guy (Comcast Chief Executive Brian L. Roberts) has made a $51-billion bid to buy the world’s best-known entertainment brand.

Comcast and Disney used to live on different sides of the media world. True to its Hollywood heritage, Disney produced content (movies, cartoons, television programming and music) that ran on movie screens and television networks and cable systems owned by Comcast and others. Now Comcast and a handful of increasingly powerful media companies hope to make entertainment and media a smaller world by concentrating their grip on content and distribution.

Peel back the layers, as Janet Jackson recently did, and the media consolidation is increasingly evident. Viacom owns CBS, which broadcasts the Super Bowl, and MTV, which produced the unfortunate halftime show. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable television company and a major force in high-speed Internet access, now hopes to snare Disney, along with its ABC television network, the vaunted theme parks, movie production companies and the ESPN juggernaut.

No matter what happens to Disney, though, the federal government must protect the public interest by ensuring that diversity of media ownership survives. What guarantees, for example, are there that Comcast wouldn’t hold Disney’s best programming back for itself, or demand higher ESPN fees from consumers whose only sin is sending the monthly cable TV check to a Comcast competitor?

The businesses of Disney and Comcast don’t overlap, so it’s uncertain whether the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission would find antitrust problems. The federal courts in 2002 cleared the way for companies to own both broadcast and cable businesses. That leaves Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to protect the public interest by ensuring that a dwindling number of media giants will not determine what Americans see and hear. Meanwhile, the entertainment value of watching this epic business battle unfold is better than fiction. Watch for the “based on a true story” movie -- on cable.