Campaign logic steers politicians not necessarily to the issues that matter most but to those where they smell electoral advantage. Others are shunted to the margins of public discourse. They become nonpolitical matters and are managed, quietly, by bureaucracies or businesses.
Case in point: The congealing of the country's mass media, the latest instance being cable giant Comcast's stunning plan to buy the Walt Disney Co. This would be the first true assertion of unitary corporate control across the full range of media of the Internet age.
In the last nine months, we first saw a sweeping regulatory move to roll back safeguards against ownership concentration. Then Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. - which owns Fox Network among many other media properties worldwide - got approval to buy the top U.S. satellite broadcaster, DirecTV.
Now we hit the trifecta: The country's biggest cable owner, Comcast Corp., wants to acquire Disney. The deal would create the largest media company, with $47 billion in annual revenues, well above Time Warner's $40 billion.
What would go under one roof?
First, the vast Disney-branded entertainment juggernaut and affiliated media empire assembled under the nearly 20-year Michael Eisner reign - Miramax, Touchstone and Buena Vista films, the sprawling ESPN sports franchise, big pieces of A&E, Lifetime and E!, and the ABC television network.
Then the Comcast side of the ledger: 21 million cable subscribers, the largest swath of households in the industry and, of greater importance, 5.3 million subscribers to high-speed Internet service. They make Comcast the country's leading broadband path to online access.
