Welcome to Michael Kinsley's Dream by DOUGLAS BARRICKLOW January 4, 1998 DALLAS, TX A funny thing popped up on the Internet in the week before Christmas. Michael Kinsley, the editor of Slate Magazine, thought it necessary to outline the reasons why we shouldn't be concerned by Microsoft Corp.'s ownership of Slate. [Michael Kinsley's "Readme" column ...] It is of course appropriate timing for such an article given Microsoft's current problems with the Justice Department. As recently as December 29, the Justice Department said Microsoft had been "jerry-rigging its own products" following an order from a Federal court meant to allow personal computer manufacturers to license the Microsoft Windows desktop operating system without being required to bundle Microsoft's own Internet browser into the package. As more and more PC users become dependent on the Windows operating system, this is just Microsoft's friendly way of nudging them toward its Internet Explorer browser with the goal of eventually monopolizing the web browser software industry.

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While the Justice Department sorts out that problem, let's take a gander at Mr. Kinsley's attempts to ease the concerns of Internet surfers who may be wondering about the editorial independence of Slate. One of the obvious problems with any corporation owning a news gathering media outlet (i.e. magazine, newspaper, television station or radio station) is the conflicts of interest that will inevitably arise during normal, everyday operation of that media outlet. As Kinsley points out, Time magazine, whose parent company is Time Warner, can't even review a movie without the existence of a conflict of interest since Time Warner either produces (through Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema) or competes against every movie that ever hits the box office. Potential conflicts don't end there: Time Warner just happens to be the largest media corporation in the world. Its holdings include CNN, Sports Illustrated, Court TV, the WB television network, TBS, TNT, HBO, Time-Life books and the Book-of-the-Month Club. I certainly won't disagree with the inherent evils present in this late-20th century monument to vertical integration. But Kinsley would have you excuse Microsoft's ownership of Slate simply because Microsoft's media holdings aren't as extensive as Time Warner's. As Michael Kinsley puts it, the potential conflicts of interest are "far greater for a publication that is part of a traditional media company than for one owned by a software company." Since most of the people at which Mr. Kinsley is aiming this argument are much more concerned with the very existence of conflicts of interest than with the actual number of conflicts of interest in these situations, it would appear this part of his argument is a complete waste of Slate's online web space. (Of course, with the weight of Microsoft's $9 billion war chest behind it, there's no reason for Slate to become stingy with its web space.) Actually, most who are concerned with corporate ownership of the media don't draw such distinctions between media corporations and non-media corporations. In so doing, Mr. Kinsley is merely evading the issue at hand: Does corporate ownership of media allow media to serve the public with the independence implied by the first amendment to The Constitution? In his editorial, Michael Kinsley eventually answers this question in as direct a manner as we could ever hope. Slate will never give Microsoft the skeptical scrutiny it requires as a powerful institution in American society... no institution can reasonably be expected to audit itself. The standard to insist on is that the sins be of omission, not distortion. There will be no major investigations of Microsoft in Slate. At least the directness of this concession is laudable. But again, a distinction has been drawn by Mr. Kinsley which has no relevance to the issue. Who can say whether omission is preferable to distortion? Now that the Justice Department is taking action against Microsoft, Slate will no doubt make great efforts to cover the story in a fair way. Because it is so public an issue, hopefully, distortion can be successfully avoided on the "pages" of Slate. But considering that Slate magazine exists only in cyberspace (for all intents and purposes anyway), serving only people who have access to cyberspace, and that this problem, as identified by the Justice Department, affects many people's ability to even reach cyberspace, doesn't the "omission" of certain information pertaining to Microsoft immediately become at least as large a problem as the distortion of information relating to Microsoft? This is but one example though to which we can apply the test of distortion versus omission. As it happens, this is the example that Michael Kinsley has chosen to address. Since we can only assume the Internet will continue to grow, Slate's conflicts of interest are going to grow with it. Kinsley's argument concerning quantity, though flawed, will inevitably become moot. Microsoft is going to encounter more conflicts of interest than it can possibly count. Still, Michael Kinsley assures us that we can always count on Time Warner's media properties to monitor those of Microsoft's and vice versa. Certainly this should ease our minds. The cut-throat nature of competition will come to the rescue, providing a more than adequate policing mechanism as we enter the age of corporate ownership of the media. Unfortunately, that's not the way things are currently playing out. According to Ben Bagdikian in the fifth edition of his book, The Media Monopoly, corporate media owners "compete only over marginal matters...underneath these skirmishes, they are interlocked in shared financial ownership and a complex of joint ventures." Bagdikian gives examples such as The New York Times entering into an arrangement to provide news for NBC (owned by General Electric) as well as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. teaming up with MCI, the second largest long distance phone company, to bid for "the last available good satellite spot in orbit." Of course, Slate's parent company has also provided us with a fine example of corporate interlocking, creating just one more entity Michael Kinsley won't need to "audit." In July of 1996, Microsoft joined up with NBC to form the all-news cable channel MSNBC. At just over a year old, this media property is providing an added punch with its significant online presence -- over 3 million pages viewed per day. And so after having hashed out this Christmas offering from Michael Kinsley to the world of journalism, I must admit that I was very surprised to discover that he had devoted any space at all to this topic in one of his Slate "Readme" editorials. After all, it was in the November/December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review that I first found a Michael Kinsley response to the critics of Microsoft's ownership of Slate. According to Kinsley, this criticism comes mostly from "the Microphobes of the cyberworld and the sort of press ethicists who are always looking for something to worry about." Now that's not the sort of quote one usually wants to discover attributed to him in the Columbia Journalism Review, but Mr. Kinsley is certainly entitled to speak his mind -- or at least he is entitled to speak his mind within the fullest parameters laid out for him by Microsoft Corp.

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