We were wondering how the administration's defense of marriage amendment was going to fly until we also caught yesterday morning's news that Comcast is looking to take over --oops, did they say merge with?-- Disney. According to the Washington Post, a major New York brokerage firm issued an analyst's report calling the proposed deal one of "perfect merger 'partners'", while Dan Rather on the CBS Nightly News --a rival of Disney's ABC-- called it a "marriage".
It hadn't struck us before that the defense of marriage amendment had something to do with key economic infrastructure. And so we thought about the metaphor and, with the Universal/Vivendi deal in mind, that nearly half of all marriages in this country result in divorce...and those are just the heterosexual ones. And then right there on CSPAN (which I was getting through Comcast) the body politic was passionately nattering about Janet again.
So here we have the government messing with marriage, the media and obscenity: One of the first rulers to start messing with marriage --to put it mildly-- was Henry VIII, who, coincidentally, is said to be a distant Bush relative. Upon taking the throne he was hooked up with his deceased brother's wife, Catharine of Aragon, who was 8 years his senior. When he couldn't get a son with his Kate, Henry decided to go for an annulment. Unfortunately for him, the Pope was one of Catherine's relatives and the rest is history.
Marriage, if the proposal goes through, is to be defined in the Constituion as the union of a male and female. Presumably incest and bigamy will still be outlawed and you'll still be able to get a divorce. The amendment will not affect Britney Spears or JLO, or any big media program where they get the pick of hundreds of women (and men) to line up in their skivvies and endure other humiliations just to marry some guy or girl for their money. Where's the shock value? After all, marriage in the past has mostly been a business affair, sometimes at the business end of a shotgun or pitchfork and often the merging of two adjacent farms, fields or kingdoms
So, according to the new Constitutional criteria, let's see how the deal between Disney and Comcast will hold up. First off, we note that this is not a marriage in which both sides agree; Comcast, the suitor, is actually forcing itself on Disney. Perhaps, then, before going too far down this path, we ought to try to determine if this is a true marriage between a male and a female and thus whether the government in the form of the FCC and SEC should support it. If so, we might have to assume that Comcast is the male and Disney ...... But then again, the Merrill Lynch analyst carefully chose the word "partners", a term often used by gay couples while Dan Rather went for "marriage".
From a program ratings standpoint, we know that Disney is unhappy. S/he hasn't been doing as well lately as s/he ought to and just recently it leaked out that s/he had given a call to Microsoft to help her in downloading movies on the Internet. Now, everybody who's watching this show in Hollywood knows what kind of lousy reputation Microsoft has when it comes to crawling in bed. Many have gone down that path and few have lived to tell the tale. In urbane business legend, MS is known as a modern day Caligula. There's even a story that as a child MS climbed into bed with the great giant of the day, IBM, who rolled over but MS, little more than a sprightly young'un, dodged and IBM ended up splashing onto the floor.
Disney just isn't the lighthearted kid s/he once was and with all the movie studios, a major network (ABC), theme parks and sporty cable channels, s/he seems to be coming apart at the seams. Along comes a kid who wants to be just the right fit. Namely, the biggest cable company(21 million customers) in the country with more broadband customers (7 million) than anybody else not to mention a few cable channels to boot.
And if we remember, it was the promise of broadband access (false, as it turned out to be) that got AOL over the top with Time Warner. Once again, we see the promise of content getting rolled by the promise of a big pipe and connections.
The naked truth is: together, this couple could squeeze a lot of players right where it hurts most but as we said, it isn't that easy. First off, Disney is going to have to do an extreme makeover, that may mean chopping off that schizophrenic head. Then there's Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck with their secret of eternal trademark life. Would they be happy answering to somebody in Philadelphia? Wasn't that why W.C. Field's left the East Coast to give Hollywood its big boost?
So, even before the government passes that Defense of Marriage Act, there's going to be a drag out tug of war. According to yesterday's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/business/media/11WIRE-COMCAST.html "The bid is likely to ignite a bitter takeover fight.... The unsolicited offer also has the potential to make Disney takeover bait for other media giants that may now be inspired to make their own bids."
To make things even messier, if they can ever get their heads off of Janet's silicone, the government will do its own snooping around the "partnership". First it will be the FCC. Now, everyone knows that Chairman Powell has never seen a big fat media wedding he didn't like but lately he has been getting a lot of heat even from some of those same conservatives in Congress who back the Marriage Amendment. There's even a Federal Court looking into his latest proposals on forced and unforced marriages.
Further, there's the SEC. Their job is to check to see if a marriage like this doesn't constitute a monopoly. Now, we also know that John Ashcroft, the head over at DOJ, which prosecutes these cases, is also a big fan of marriage, though not of "Marry a Millionaire" type programming.
Our guess: this is one marriage the administration will smile upon without getting under the covers to decide who's up and who's down. Obscenity, it seems once again, is in the eye of the beholder. That the guy who controls the pipe going into the house, the set-top box, the future delivery system for music and video, also gets to own a major studio and one of the big four networks, wow, that's beautiful, man! At least that's the view on Wall Street.
And who said reality TV is dead?
rmb
Copyright 2003 Richard Mendel-Black All Rights Reserved
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