Time Warner was the world’s largest media company. AOL was the world’s largest internet provider. And on January 11, 2001, a year after their merger was announced, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the AOL acquisition of Time Warner. The merger will help the internet grow even more and become the central point for entertainment by “speeding up the development of interactive television and online entertainment as the company funnels Time Warner content onto AOL’s network” (Davidson, 2001). As AOL Time Warner expands in the near future and companies are combined or new companies are starter, the integrity of journalism could be jeopardized.

The FCC under the conditions aimed at protecting rival instant messaging providers and small internet service providers approved the $100 billion purchase. FCC Chairman William Kennard defended the decision by stating “We could not find (the deal) was in the public interest without conditions designed to protect the open competitive nature of the Internet” (Davidson, 2001).

Through the merger AOL acquired the rights to some of entertainments most familiar names such as Time and People magazines, HBO, and

The synergy between the companies of a mega-merger is not beneficial to a news organization. Traditional journalistic news values and ideas become a conflict of interest. How can Time conceivably cover this very issue of media mergers when it would involve covering AOL, its parent company? The news could be distorted by not mentioning anything negative about AOL or any of its entities in which the news viewer would not be given the full story. This is a decline in the quality of AOL Time Warner’s journalistic procedures.

Vertical Integration is another form AOL-Time Warner uses to produce its products. This form of integration owns assets involved in the production, distribution, exhibition, and sale of a single type of media product (Croteau & Hoynes, 2001, pg. 94). An author submits a book idea to Warner Publisher Services. WPS then passes the idea on to New Line Cinema to produce the movie. The video release for this movie will be on Warner Home Video and will also be shown on TBS and HBO. By using companies that are partly owned and incorporated with AOL Time Warner, vertical integration is working with the end result of the production costs being greatly reduced (refer to Figure 2 – Horizontal and Vertical Integration of the movie Artificial Intelligence on pg. 8). Here again, the synergy of a company’s assets can bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

New media companies buying out or merging with old media companies initially was a business strategy to help save the old media businesses. The conglomeration of these companies in effect may bring a larger profit, but at what costs? Legitimate journalism. In an article co-written by Tom Rosentiel and Bill Kovach titled “The Bad Business of Media Mergers” claimed that when Steve Case of America Online announced his purchase of Time Warner, he listed his order of activities in which journalism was not in the top three priorities (Rosentiel & Kovach, 2000).

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