Mergers Make for Strained Bedfellows

News item: Times Mirror Co., parent company of The Times, has agreed to be taken over by Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and more than two dozen other media properties, including KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles.

As I was saying, KTLA is the best station on the planet. Love you, man!

Intelligence, integrity, honesty, humility, kindness, goodness, public service, vision--the entire package.

I especially love the “KTLA Morning News.” You know, the program with all those funny people in red bulb noses and baggy pants goofing off and turning somersaults in the sawdust while the world outside their tent shakes and rumbles?

Spectacular!

And those Sam Rubin entertainment reports? Absolutely first-rate the way he’s able to synthesize so much material from other sources. Thumbs up, Sammy! Also, love that three-cornered jester’s hat with the little bells.

As I’ve said so many times, a newscast can’t have too many stand-up comics. That’s why I appreciate weatherman Mark Kriski too.

By the way, remember when I called KTLA’s 10 p.m. anchorman Hal Fishman an egomaniacal windbag? Get outta here. I was just kidding. A humble bag of warmth is what the Fishster is. They should build a shrine to him.

I checked out the entire KTLA schedule this week, for the sheer joy of it. Simply stunning! What impressed me, also, was the sincerity of that sweet old dearie, Sally Jessy Raphael, on her syndicated talk show that KTLA runs. The tears, the tissues. Now there’s a woman who really cares.

And those reruns of “The Nanny” with Fran Drescher at 12:30 a.m.? Funneeeeee!

Yes, I can’t begin to convey the thrill of being on the verge of becoming a colleague of these and other KTLA greats now that it’s likely that Times Mirror Co. will become part of Tribune Co.

Did I say thrill? Think root canal.

Nothing personal. But KTLA is one of 22 TV stations owned by Tribune Co., which also has a financial interest in the WB network that airs on KTLA in prime time. Tribune Co. also has cable and satellite interests that include a piece of the Food Network and ownership of the WGN superstation that televises the games of the Tribune-owned Chicago Cubs.

You can see the problem: These TV entities are part of my beat. Read that to mean potential conflict of interest. At the very least, a perceived one.

Monday’s announcement of the proposed Tribune-Times Mirror marriage is more evidence that 2000 is becoming another year of the colossus when it comes to media consolidation, with the monster of mergers--Time Warner and America Online--also pending.

There’s no question that multibillion-dollar alliances can benefit the public by creating or freeing capital that may strengthen media coverage on some levels. The downside, though, is that centering control in fewer and fewer hands swells what media critic Mark Crispin Miller calls the “toxic influence of those few corporations that have monopolized our culture.”

In other words, all the more opportunity for propaganda to be fashioned by omnipotent media messengers to fit their personal agendas. Evil media mogul Elliot Carver does this in the 1997 James Bond film, “Tomorrow Never Dies,” by using technology to create news he wants to report.

“Words are the new weapons,” he notes, “satellites the new artillery.”

Forget government. We of the media have seen Big Brother, and he is us. “Some of the largest corporations in the country and the world . . . now own distribution and control of what much of the American public sees,” another media critic, Ben Bagdikian, has observed.

Flash back to the ‘90s, for example.

NBC was already part of giant General Electric Co. when Walt Disney Co. absorbed Capital Cities/ABC, when Westinghouse Electric Corp. consumed CBS and when Time Warner Inc. acquired Ted Turner’s vast interests in building the largest media archipelago in the universe.

The result? Among their numerous other entities, GE, Disney, Westinghouse and Time Warner control NBC News, ABC News, CBS News and CNN, respectively. Even that doesn’t include NBC’s cable offspring, CNBC, and the network’s stake with Microsoft in MSNBC. Nor Rupert Murdoch’s behemoth News Corp., which includes Fox Television, the Fox News Channel, 20th Century Fox, TV Guide, HarperCollins, the New York Post and major newspapers and massive TV systems abroad.

Although elfin compared with much of this, a Tribune-Times Mirror union would extend a trend of creating titanic hybrids that channel more power to the fewer.

Is bigger necessarily better? For stockholders like me, possibly. But it’s hard to see how the wider public stands to benefit directly from alliances that further consolidate clout and influence. Streamlining ownership this way hardly promotes diversity.

Just as worrisome are the potential conflicts down here on the lowly pavement created by the incestuous couplings taking place in the towers of corporatedom.

If Tribune’s absorption of Times Mirror goes through as expected, for example, readers have a right to be ever more skeptical about what is written about TV in this column. If I praise Tribune properties, will it be because I feel they’re worthy or because we’re family, and I have my own financial stake at heart? If I fault competitors of Tribune properties, will it be legit or chauvinism? And conversely, if I’m critical of Tribune properties, will it be deserved or will I be overcompensating to show my independence?

When I was a callow young reporter at the Moline Dispatch in Illinois, I would have given anything for a job with the mighty Chicago Tribune. In a sense, that appears ready to happen.

And by the way, did I mention how much I love “Dawson’s Creek”?

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.