Screen Practice and Conglomeration: How Reflexivity and Conglomeration Fuel Each Other (2024)

John T. Caldwell

Although films and television series about films and television series now pervade most viewers’ multichannel entertainment options, the stylistic practices that fuel these self-referencing genres—on-screen reflexivity, intertextuality, and critical deconstruction—were, as I have argued elsewhere, important parts of American television programming since the 1940s.1 Although film studies and literary theory have traditionally characterized reflexivity as counter to “dominant” media, critical reflexivity now stands as a primary form of content for mainstream variants of film and television in the age of cable, the Internet, and digital media. At first glance, this connection, between increasing corporatization and reflexivity, may seem counterintuitive. Yet, the growing deregulation of media since the mid-1980s, and the steady advance of commercial consolidation through the 1990s and early 2000s into but five huge conglomerates (Time Warner/AOL, News Corporation/Fox, Viacom/CBS, Disney/ABC, Universal/NBC), has made these ostensibly progressive and resistant reflexive and stylistic practices far more prominent, rather than less so. To examine this trend, in this essay I consider together two spheres that are normally segregated in the academy: the stylistic and textual practices of television, alongside the industrial practices of contemporary conglomeration. By the 2000s, reflexive stylistic practices emerged not only as a marker of edgy programming but also as lucrative mainstream mechanisms that helped rationalize the industry as well as orient viewers to the logic and possibilities of the giant new conglomerates. How and why this happened is worth considering in more detail.

Disclosing behind-the-scenes film and video production knowledge to the public morphed into a programming obsession in the 1990s. The Viacom conglomerate (VHi, MTV, and Nick at Nite) in particular, was especially good at exploiting and promoting the “new” trend. VHi's series Pop-Up Video profitably mastered on-screen deconstruction as a viable mainstream genre in the 1990s, and many other shows subsequently emulated Pop-Up's penchant for showcasing and deconstructing behind-the-scenes knowledge. Begun in 1985 to blunt competitors’ ability to take over MTV's market share, cable network VH1 earned a reputation for on-screen blandness and managerial dysfunction that almost led to the network's demise in 1994. In that year, the network brought in hot-shot former MTV programmer John Sykes to turn things around at VH1. In 1996, Pop-Up Video emerged as dramatic proof that the Sykes's VH1 rebranding overhaul had succeeded. The concept was simple: take existing music videos, and graphically insert quirky and critical “thought-bubbles” that percolated onto the screen during the performance. What resulted was a nonstop, wall-to-wall critical dialogue and metacommentary about the video production that now displaced the original music video as the viewer's primary on-screen experience. Former VH1 executive Anthony DeCurtis noted: “That was the first time that VH1 had done something that entered the national consciousness. Everyone knew what Pop-Up Video was.”2

Pop-Up Video and its descendants quickly became grist for showbiz's buzz mill, and parodies followed on everything from Saturday Night Live and Star Trek: Voyager, to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: VHi's Pop-Up Celebrity Editions.3 Almost any network could tie its content to some backstage film or television connection, as Bravo did in 2003 producing its genre deconstruction The Reality Behind Reality (alongside its hit Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), and as the History Channel did in 2004 producing its Greatest Movie Gadgets. But the influence was not just external. Pop-Up Video became the development paradigm for much of the programming that followed on VH1 as well, including VH1's flagship hit Behind the Music, the full-scale cultural deconstructions I Love the 70s, and I Love the 80s, and even publishing variants, such as the book Pop This! (which “contains ‘still-lifes’ of some of the biggest stars and the best pop-ups”).4 VHi's trademark “dissolution”-of-“myths approach explicitly foregrounded screen theory and critical analysis as primary content in 2003- 4's SuperSecret TV Formulas. Reminiscent of an undergraduate film studies course, the show uses close scene-by-scene analysis and interviews with behind-the-scenes industry veterans to “expose recurring ideological subtexts, genre, stunt and marketing disasters, and narrative formulas like “the catfight” and “evil twin” motifs.

Current trends underscore the historical influence of Pop-Up Video and its sibling Behind the Music across the industry. Former VH1 and Pop- Up executive Jeff Gaspin brought the behind-the-scenes approach to NBC's Bravo, where, as chief executive, he launched Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Boy Meets Boy (premiered July 29, 2003, and ran for one season), But I Played One on TV (developed in 2003 but never aired), and Ready Set Van-Gogh (pilot episode screened for press but not aired). Significantly, Gaspin and Bravo strategized all of these series in terms of their potential to generate pop-culture buzz and on-screen parodies on other shows and networks.5 Similarly, VH1 and Pop-Up executive Lauren Zalaznick now makes de-construction the defining programming paradigm at Universal's new cable network Trio, where she serves as chief executive. Trio's deconstructions—all involving onscreen metacommentaries—include a documentary series involving twenty-four-hour behind-the-scenes looks at film or television celebrities, Battle of the Network Stars, repackaged reruns about pop culture, and entire weekly schedules “programmed” by film directors such as Quentin Tarantino. Zalaznick's original concept for the network, “The Genius of the Idiot Box,” eventually morphed into the network's new slogan, “Pop, culture, TV.”6 Cultural analysis and critique pervade each week's programming schedule, not just at PBS, VH1, Bravo/NBC, and Trio/Universal, but across the full network spectrum as well. These series and producer's comments situate reflexivity and the deconstruction of behind-the-scenes knowledge, not just in the increasing sophistication of audiences, but squarely in the domain of cross-promotion, multipurposing, and brand marketing by the conglomerates. Meta-critical programming of this sort only barely conceals its industrial functions as forms of intra-industry communication, self-promotion, competitor discrediting, or leveraging. Considering these “business activities as” authoring mechanisms requires better understanding the forms of convergence and conglomeration that set reflexive programming in motion in the first place.

Various scholars, including myself, have examined “convergence” as a confluence of technological, artistic, and audience phenomena.7 Yet to fully understand convergence in those terms necessitates considering convergence as a corporate phenomenon as well, otherwise known by executives and stockholders (with economic interests) as “consolidation” and by critics and production workers (with public and labor interests) as “conglomeration.” Conglomerates are essentially megacorporations comprised of many different smaller or more specialized companies or units, linked by common ownership. Advocates of deregulation argue that the government should get out of the business of controlling or “interfering” with the actions of free markets, and see large media conglomerates as a logical outgrowth of legitimate market forces. Proponents also argue that even though large conglomerates can greatly reduce competition (through mergers, hostile takeovers, or bankruptcies), they frequently provide better services and products more efficiently than markets comprised of many different smaller competitors. This optimistic view can be thought of as the “Microsoft principle.”

When fewer and fewer conglomerates dominate a given market, however, the specter of monopoly frequently elicits restraint-of-trade accusations by critics and workers, and regulatory actions by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The sunny boardroom picture of market efficiency via conglomeration described above, however, seldom resonates either with the companies that are downsized, bankrupted, or vanquished, or with the laid-off or merged employees within the conglomerates. Despite the anticonglomerate precedent of the 1948 Paramount Consent Decrees, which broke up earlier monopolistic practices in favor of independent companies, by 2002 the five, giant, newly configured media conglomerates mentioned above again controlled almost 90 percent of the U.S. electronic media market. These five conglomerates do not closely resemble the pre-Para-mount decree film studios, however, since the current conglomerates are horizontally diversified as well as vertically integrated. That is, in addition to owning production, distribution, and exhibition capacity in a single sector (feature films), they typically own such chains across multiple media sectors as well (film, television, cable, new media, etc.). Such activities can be understood in terms of the types of “integration” and “diversification” they presuppose (Table 11.1).

In this context, the new conglomerates are “tightly diversified” (since their properties are closely related as media sectors) rather than “loosely diversified” (as when petrochemical giant Gulf+Western took over Paramount in 1966 or when French bottler and sanitation company Vivendi merged with Universal Studios in 2000, both to disastrous results).8 Nor are the current conglomerates like the classical national television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) of the 1960s and 1970s. In the earlier period, ABC, CBS, and NBC together faced little competition from anyone else so could “mass produce” formulaic sitcom and hour dramas for a more hom*ogenous “economy of scale.” The current executive vice president of Viacom/CBS, Dennis Swanson, spoke of the earlier period in wistful terms: “You just answered the phone took the orders and then went out golfing. My gosh, that was fun.” Given the predictability and sameness of programming, the executive explains “how easy” broadcast television was during the network era, since “some of the dumbest people then are now billionaires.”9 By contrast, the on-screen content of the current conglomerates since the success of cable in the late 1980s has focused on “narrowcasting” (rather than “broadcasting”). This strategy results in greater diversity of style and content, but as part of a narrower or “niche economy of scope.” The working principle here is that finding and focusing on the specialized tastes of a narrow segment of the audience is more lucrative per viewer than wasting expensive production resources on vast audiences, many of whom are simply not interested in shows made for mass or “average” audiences.

Blockbuster feature films still follow a mass-produced economy-of-scale formula (expensive generic products mass marketed in order to substantially lower production costs per viewer). Yet many other, perhaps most, examples of films and series today are based on economies of scope (inexpensive “indie” products sold to specialized market sectors) since the potential financial return (per capita) from each of these ostensibly “more dedicated viewers is higher. AtomFilms, for example, aggressively acquired short films to distribute to airlines, Web sites, malls, handheld devices, and phones.10 By distributing a type of film that has little proven cash value to either ad agencies or box-office-based exhibitors (short animations and interactive films), AtomFilms was forced to seek out the kinds of venues where fans of this sort of content could be found, hence Atom's emphasis on the Internet, cell phones, and handheld devices. To make its business model work, however, Atom had to acquire vast amounts of cheap short-film content (more than twenty thousand titles) from independents, amateurs, and film students with little or no up-front financing or advances, and therefore no risk. After raising vast amounts of venture capital, AtomFilms ultimately failed, because although it found and cultivated a narrow niche of dedicated viewers/users, there were no realistic ways to harvest financial returns for the benefit of their thousands of indie producers, who seldom were paid in anything other than the symbolic capital allowing them to claim that “I have a film distributor.” Ironically, the major conglomerates, rather than independents, have learned to make far better use of the ”mobile” economies-of-scope system, since they control both content (films, programs) and distribution outlets defined by proven business models (cable, DVDs, video games). This is one of the contradictions of the scope model: niche narrowcasting works, but only if such niches are aggregated within a distribution system that has already been rationalized industrially and economically. This is why Disney/ABC is better at narrowcasting than AtomFilms.

The examples thus far suggest important interrelations between both industrial organization and on-screen stylistic practice within conglomeration.11 The pages that follow make four general arguments: (1) that conglomerate multipur-posing has changed content development, consumption, and financing through amortization and cross-collateralization; (2) that multimedia platforming optimizes marketing cross-promotion within conglomerates; (3) that conglomerate tiering based on programming taste/identity “difference” promotes multicultural diversity, which in turn helps sanction and publicly legitimize the conglomerate; and (4) that reflexivity and on-screen metatexts now serve as user guides that enable viewers to navigate the conglomerates extensive and complicated multimedia platforms. All four of these dynamics help symbolically displace or efface the monolithic nature of the conglomerates. In doing so, they buffer the megacorporations from accusations of unfair-restraint-of-trade practice. The genius of the new media conglomerates is that their textual and industrial practices cultivate a sense of public trusteeship that the earlier film-and-television monopolies were never able to fully muster to defend themselves—even though the classical television networks were officially assigned such public trusteeship by the government.

Post-Fordist Flexibility

The conglomerate practices examined in this essay—of multipurposing, collateralization, cross-promotion, and tiering—provide one thing contemporary industries need more than anything else for economic survival in the age of post-Fordist capitalism: flexibility. Since the conglomerates produce vast amounts of fairly ephemeral experiential or cultural capital rather than tangible or traditional industrial products, and since production company life spans can be incredibly brief (sometimes lasting for only the few months it takes to make a film or series), the conglomerates cannot lock up inordinate amounts of capital in assembly lines and long-term employee contracts as they did during the classic studio era. Fordism and Taylorism allowed the classical studios to segregate and regiment technical tasks, to systematically rationalize the film production process, and to minimize uncertainty in market outcomes. This resulted because the system was dedicated to finding long-term cost and labor efficiencies that come with a mass economy of scale. The idea behind Hollywood's factory-system approach, at root, was that a uniform, generic, and predictable product (like a Ford automobile or a Warner Bros. gangster film) could be marketed to buyers or viewers on a mass scale (i.e., the same product and quality in every market in the nation and world). The Fordist system's proven profitability, furthermore, inclined the studios and networks to pursue and justify vertical integration and oligopoly.

By contrast, current highly competitive, multichannel markets, along with government safeguards for consumers (in the form of fair-trade media regulations) provide far greater uncertainties in economic outcomes for the studios and networks. Since buyers are seldom fixed, guaranteed, and unchanging, and since new technologies constantly upset and alter the production process itself, studios and networks today must find ways to move quickly to adapt to any new contingency thrown their way. This problem includes rapid changes in film and television exhibition as well as consumer technologies that divert or hijack audiences to other venues outside of the arms of the conglomerate. Contingencies also include innovations in production technology that require a new kind of labor force, skills, space, and/or infrastructure. With change and uncertainty the order of the day, the new conglomerates have to seek ways to find and cultivate excessively large numbers of potential scripts and film projects on the industry's “input boundaries,” for example, since most films are deemed failures and most television series are almost immediately canceled. Post-Fordism emphasizes the economic importance of flexible manufacturing, flexible capital, and flexible labor. In contradistinction to earlier corporations, which were defined and anchored by heavy manufacturing plants, studio back lots, or guaranteed network programming pipelines—typically protected by governmental regulations—the new economy rewards companies adept at a range of new corporate capabilities: quickly exploiting research and development, securing new intellectual properties, mining (and then aggregating) niche demographics, reconfiguring corporate alliances, and finding and embracing synergies at almost every level (from workplace relations to transnational conglomeration). This scheme also requires moving quickly to develop and overproduce new content for the industry's “output boundaries” as well (distribution, exhibition, and viewing). Post-Fordism typically entails establishing short-term labor contracts and a malleable technical infrastructure, which allows the company to continually reinvent itself and its production process, even as the brand remains the same.

The picture I've sketched here—of the vast oversupply of film and television content and the proliferation of avenues of consumption at the output boundaries—has meant two things among others. First, many mediators, or what Paul Hirsch termed “contact men” (agents, managers, lawyers, representatives, and coaches, rather than salaried studio or network employees) are needed to build relationships, negotiate serial affiliations, and manage potential content suppliers and solicitors at the fluid input and output boundaries.12 This systematic outsourcing of negotiation to agents or contact men at the input boundaries, in turn, keeps the needed oversupply of independent producers and screenwriters at arm's length, and without any long-term security. In addition, the fluidity and ever-changing venues for viewing and consumption at the output boundaries mean that the conglomerates with the greatest number of multimedia distribution platforms face less risk when technological or cultural change occurs, hence the constant pressure to merge, take over, or acquire still more multimedia distribution properties.

The resulting conglomerate bears distinctive features. The studio or network of the classical era can be thought of, figuratively, as a pyramid, with a wide and solid base, or foundation, comprised of propriety production resources, a large cadre of specialized and salaried employees, and exhibition outlets, all contained within the bounds of a rigid top-down management structure and chain of command. The new media conglomerates, by contrast, are in some ways like inverted pyramids, with a narrower set of proprietary tangible properties and fewer long-term production or salaried employees at the bottom. At the top, however, the new companies use a wide rhizomic, or networked, executive management structure rather than a vertical chain of command. This organizational form allows the company to move capital quickly across units in the top strata of the conglomerate and its multimedia nodes (as the opportunity or need arises). The provisional nature of the narrow base, however, allows the conglomerate to quickly contract or affiliate with any independent production organization that circulates adjacent to the inverted point of the media brand on the ground. Given this precarious orientation, effective new media conglomerates can be thought of as shape-shifting phenomena—heavy on management activity, but fluid and selective in finding and exploiting only the production resources the company actually needs for short-term projects. In effect, the new conglomerates attempt—despite their vast holdings and precarious positions—to travel fast and light.

Externalizing Risk (and Texts)

The very volatility and uncertainty of the contemporary multimedia economy means that contemporary media conglomerates place considerable emphasis on strategies aimed at externalizing risk. The industry has responded to the economic risk of increasingly uncertain outcomes in film and television by deploying a range of tactics designed to displace that financial risk onto the shoulders of suppliers, workers, affiliates, and buyers, rather than on the conglomerate or its stockholders. This displacement or outsourcing of risk has had a direct impact on on-screen texts, and can take place via at least seven strategies.

1. New technologies and screen texts (when major studios contract out costly computer-generated imagery, animation, or visual-effects work to independent boutiques, rather than buying the equipment and/or building dedicated spaces themselves). When visual-effects work shifted from mechanical to computerized methods, the major studios paid independent companies to shoulder the risks that come with any new technology development. This includes training and start-up costs in addition to technology costs. The advent and popularization of Technicolor processing in the 1930s and Panavision 35-millimeter cameras in the 1960s also helped the studios externalize the risk that came with these costly production options. Technicolor was proprietary, expensive, and beyond the parameters of the on-the-lot studio laboratories. Similarly, because Panavision cameras are so expensive and specialized, studios do not own them, and utilize them only on a rental or lease basis, thereby leaving major maintenance and upgrade costs to the manufacturer. The current shift away from film in favor of digital intermediates (DIs) as postproduction masters (even for features shot on film) also follows this logic of outsourcing as a buffer against new-technology instabilities. Using an electronic master, rather than the traditional optically printed, film-based interpositive (IP) or duplicate negative (DN), allows production companies to externalize the risk of costly and unproven new technologies onto stand-alone companies who specialize in—and stylistically exploit (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not)—the as-yet nonstandardized DI process. After almost a century in which everyone in the industry adhered to the rigid rules that made the 35-millimeter DN a consistent and universal technical benchmark for color timing and exposure, the off-loaded DI has opened the floodgates of stylistic diversity. Sometimes outsourced technical risk leads to rather uniform stylistic changes (as in Technicolor and Panavision); sometimes outsourcing technical risk produces perpetually unorthodox and uncontrolled stylistic changes (as in computer-generated imagery [CGI] and the DI).

2. Cross-promotion and screen texts (when major studios or conglomerates acquire television or cable networks primarily to advertise and promote their own feature films). It is generally agreed that the single biggest factor affecting the success of a feature film upon release is advertising on television. Owning a broadcast or cable network, or local stations, gives the studio in this enviable position several advantages. First, the studio can negotiate (essentially with itself) to buy and place spots in the most desirable and highly rated programming segments (with the heaviest barrage slated in the week leading up to the release). Second, the studio or network can create and encourage (well in advance of the release) intertextual references to released films or their stars within existing dramatic or entertainment series (since most studios have both film and television production arms). Third, the network can produce and program “making-ofs,” and “behind-the-scenes” specials timed to spike buzz during the week of the release of a given film. Fourth, the network can air—in contiguous slots throughout the week of the release—previous films by the actors or director of a forthcoming or released film (a common practice, as when Born on the Fourth of July [Oliver Stone, 1989] or Days of Thunder [Tony Scott, 1990] were broadcast during the week that Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai [Edward Zwick, 2003] was released). Fifth and finally, the conglomerate can evaluate and laud its new releases during the half-hour early-prime showbiz reports and entertainment news series that the conglomerate's stations and networks air nightly. Broadcast and cable, therefore, offer the studio and the conglomerate a marketing executive's dream—a complete package of promotional and marketing opportunities, before, during, and after a film's release. Although such tactics may look like old-fashioned, incestuous flogging, the process also shifts much of the studio's risk and the costs of a large film-marketing campaign onto the shoulders of affiliate networks and stations within the conglomerate. The conglomerate's networks also take upon themselves many of the cross-promotional forms just described, as part of their own internal programming budgets (again, taking risk away from the studios). This cross-promotional exchange, by definition, takes place through on-screen texts. The proliferation of studio and network Web sites merely extends the tried-and-true method of cross-promotion first established by studio-network synergies.

3. Multimedia development and screen texts (when several distribution windows in different media are launched simultaneously). This tactic essentially involves repurposing and multipurposing strategies for on-screen media content, and is regularly associated with the multimedia platforms of the five largest conglomerates, described earlier. The trades and financial columns have paid particular attention to this method of externalizing risk, since it closely mirrors the ideals of synergy celebrated in the industry. To compete critically and ratings-wise with the growing programming success of HBO in 2003, for example, NBC coproduced and broadcast the limited series Kingpin (a stylish and violent Sopranos clone about Mexican drug cartels and their Latino-American families). Hyped as must-see TV, the miniseries was simultaneously broadcast with Spanish dialogue on NBC's Telemundo network, immediately repeated on NBC's “arts” cable network Bravo, distributed on NBC's Latin American cable network Mun2, and almost immediately available on DVD as a prefabricated “cult classic.” In addition, bits and pieces of the multimedia event were cross-promoted: on NBC affiliate stations such as KNBC-Burbank (which ran “special reports” on “the real” Mexican drug cartels and the confrontations that KNBC's television reporters have had with them); on numerous NBC affiliates that aired first-run syndicated showbiz report series such as Entertainment Tonight (produced by CBS Television Distribution) and Access Hollywood that featured stories on the cast and producers of the miniseries); and on NBCi (the network's Web site, which provided running visual and textual commentary on Kingpin). In this way, all of Universal/NBC's corporate arms were taking on the expensive Kingpin initiative, and the financial risks that came with it, as their own. Nowadays, conglomerates no longer bounce on-screen content sequentially down the line of the company's successive media platforms, but rather develop that content for roughly simultaneous release on as many of those platforms as it can. If NBC had shouldered the costs of the Kingpin project alone, ad sales in broadcast would never have paid for the steep costs of this supposedly “prestige” production. Multimedia development now ensures that on-screen texts are migratory and shape-shifting.

4. Merchandising and screen texts (when product placement and ancillary markets allow producers to recoup income downstream from the primary film or series). Although many in the self-styled “creative community” of Hollywood still like to imagine that a recognizably artistic mission is at the heart of their enterprise, the fact is that screen-related merchandise has become an important, but seldom celebrated, prerequisite consideration for feature film and prime-time development today. Video games, which can be thought of as either multimedia or merchandise, depending on the user, have far surpassed the total box office receipts of the feature film industry since 1988. Miranda Banks has demonstrated how integrally inexpensive toys and action figures have become in the development and success of scores of television shows in and outside of prime time. In 2000, Turner's half-hour animated Powerpuff Girls series on Cartoon Network—which was never intended to initiate either Emmy talk, or high ratings, or critical buzz—generated $300 million from show-related merchandising in a single year alone.13 In essence, television-related dolls from a marginally rated “basic cable” channel dwarf the box-office receipts of most feature films. Yet critics, journalists, and academic scholars—obsessed with the higher cultural “prestige” of cinema—seldom acknowledge the determining power of merchandising in making films and series possible. I would argue that while Powerpuff Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be thought of as quintessential narrowcast or niche program forms (and therefore part of the risky post-Fordist economy-of-scope equation), the extensive flood of low-cost, show-related mass marketed merchandise directly impacts the kinds of shows that are developed, and what they look like. This flood of merchandise also allows production companies to harvest excessively large profits (following a more stable Fordist economy-of-mass-scale business model).

5. Domestic coproduction and screen-text strategies (as in the standard deficit-financing deals for independent companies that produce for network television).14 Because the major broadcast networks have been in a position of influence or control since the early 1950s over what gets broadcast and when, independent program suppliers have been stuck with absorbing escalating program production costs. In this system, called “deficit financing,” independent companies promise to make programs for the networks that cost significantly more than the network actually pays for them. In exchange for taking on the network's risk, the independents are offered the possibility of recouping costs on the “back end” of a program's life, in syndication (subsequent direct sales or reruns to independent stations). Historically, the system developed only because of the government-protected monopolistic position and practices of the three major networks, who could force independents to partner in sharing the risk. Mark Alvey and Tom Schatz described another form of risk externalization in another kind of coproduction popular by the late 1950s. After the breakup of the studio system, the major film studios began to externalize their risk and economic uncertainty by shifting to a “package system” and by bringing smaller independent production companies onto the studio lot as partners in coproduction. As a result, smaller companies such as Screen Gems, Irwin Allen, and Quinn-Martin became “house companies” of the major studios Columbia, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros., respectively.15 In effect, the larger majors—in their greatly reduced but more predictable roles as landlords and distributors—provide the office space, buildings, and back lots, while the smaller house companies shoulder the riskier tasks of textual content development for the big or small screen.

6. International coproductions and screen texts (when companies from several countries pool resources, content, and/or talent to produce a film or television show and share distribution revenues). Much of what passes for globalization or cultural imperialism today is the result of international coproduction. Media do not simply “flow” in a linear fashion from one place to another, as early versions of the “cultural imperialism model assumed, dominating indigenous, national, and regional production as they roll across international borders. Borders are crossed in film and television today usually because of the participation of commercial entities on both sides of the border. A Universal Television executive explained the success of the studio's “Action Pack” series of first-run syndicated dramas (Hercules, Xena) in a quintessentially pragmatic and ideology-free American way: “Does Universal do offshore deals? Universal has two kinds of deals. We started the action business in the early nineties. We went to our key customers. And we said: ‘Okay. If you can help us make these things we'll make them with you.’”16 Yet this rarely means that there is not an imbalance of power or resentment on the part of those receiving the “help.” The cheery picture of no-strings-attached U.S. dollars coming in to transform international financing into an indigenous or regionally appropriate television enterprise generates some cynicism from non-U.S. broadcasters and producers. French and British media executives in particular invoke their own “cultural exceptionalism” in the face of the lowest-common-denominator quality of programs that result from cofinancing and coproduction. Said one British television executive dismissively, “We remain a tiny Island off of the north of Europe. We are cynical about what we patronizingly consider ‘Euro-Pudding’ [cofinancing].”17

Yet major U.S. studio executives such as James Dowaliby at Paramount seem almost resigned to the fact that the rest of the world needs Hollywood's unique talent to make their own national television industries go. “I think the perception is still true that we will have a staggeringly dangerous effect on the local [coproduction] partners. There is fear and trepidation when we walk into the room. I think our goal is to make the best show that we can—in the best way that we know how. But what America does, and what our partners usually look for, is our writers, and our writing process, and our team of writers. And I probably spend fifty percent of my time setting up the writer relationships, the showrunner relationships, with them.”18 The reality is that while American blockbuster feature films travel easily across borders (usually requiring dubbing or subtitling and little else), international television distribution is a very different story. American television can no longer be dumped into international markets without considerable negotiation, not just of contracts but of on-screen content as well. In effect the only way that the U.S. studios can make the high cost of production back is through partnering and coproduction. With a smaller and smaller audience at home, and faced with escalating production costs, spreading out the pain and risk to foreign partners is now a predictable part of any new film and television development deal.

7. New labor arrangements and screen texts (as in runaway production that voids long-term job protections). In each case the riskier industrial phases of film and television (content development, visual effects, postproduction, union entitlements, upgraded soundstages and infrastructure, and box-office or audience consumption) are either contracted out or shared with affiliates. Toby Miller et al. have written a particularly good book describing how runaway production involves far more than a simple shift in the location of film or television production.19 The studios and conglomerates get away with systematic outsourcing by cultivating what Miller et al. termed a complex reconfiguration of production called the “new international division of cultural labor” (NICL). In this scheme, many different companies may participate in coproductions, which always tend to have key administrative centers in the United States. That is, jobs do not simply “go away, as the popular rhetoric suggests. Instead, corporate webs cut across numerous borders, allowing the conglomerate to find efficiencies in various specialized labor niches, while at the same time calling the production in question an “American” enterprise (thus dulling claims of runaway production). Yet many in the production communities are not naive about the sophisticated ways by which labor goes elsewhere even as the production itself looks to be centered in the United States. No less than Meryl Marshall, the president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS), challenges the conglomerates’ tendency to take production elsewhere merely to save labor costs. “I think these companies are taking advantage of the globalization of the market. The [conglomerates] may not be as invested in their local communities. I do think there is a very serious concern here about the exploitation of expertise—which is what most of these conglomerates are engaged in. They are currently setting up production entities around the world. They are being enticed by tax incentives, tax credits, and subsidies from companies in Europe and the far east and Canada.”20

The executives and producers draw out the implications of runaway production. “The storytelling expertise [has been] taken outside[, resulting in] the lack of current employment opportunities. Originally this happened in the animation area. Now in the movie-of-the week area … in the TV series area in the future. There are lots of ramifications. Both to the individual American workforce—but more important, to the storytellers here.”21 Faced with a vast trend, ostensibly out of the control of the networks and advocacy organizations such as ATAS, this producer/executive fell back on a cultural, rather than purely economic, appeal. That is, storytelling (a cultural activity) is both a defining property of America's creative industries and the victim of “the exploitation of expertise.” An executive of News Corporation retorted to Marshall's appeal, “That's the world we live in. There's vertical integration. It's a global world. And we re going to sell our projects across the globe. And that's just the way it is.”22 The conglomerate's need to externalize risk trumps the production culture's appeal that the art of storytelling is a national resource whose loss will hurt America in the long run.23

Advocates of the U.S. creative community, like Marshall, are very good at dramatizing how conglomerates kill human creativity. But this very gambit—of making corporate practice the antithesis of creative, textual practice—obscures the fundamental ways that the new conglomerates also function as corporate auteurs. In other words, this easy caricaturing also glosses over the fairly sophisticated ways that corporate stylistic and on-screen textual practices help sanction and legitimize conglomeration. Texts matter, and for reasons that go well beyond the various permutations of farming out and risk outsourcing outlined above. Conglomerate texts resolutely cultivate the notion that the institutions that author them are anything but old-fashioned industry heavies that unfairly restrain trade. Given persistent concerns and anxieties in some sectors about why government continually green-lights corporate media consolidation, however, it is worth considering how these same conglomerates elicited such a blessing, through both business activities and on-screen texts. I argue in the sections that follow that two broad strategies—both of which involve on-screen textual practices—have been particularly effective in sanctioning and legitimizing unchecked media conglomeration. Textually, the conglomerates have been particularly effective at cultivating, first, a “responsive corporate persona” and, second, an effective “public service aura.”

Sanctioning the Monolith 1: Conglomeration's “Responsive” Persona

Media conglomerates create formidable obstacles for any new company seeking to enter a given market with its on-screen content, as well as problems and anxieties for employees working under the umbrella of conglomeration. The wide-scale sanction given conglomeration, therefore, raises serious questions about how the new megacompanies so effectively deflect political criticism from governmental overseers of conglomeration. I suggest that media conglomerates have ably used two broad reflexive approaches to normalize and legitimize conglomeration. First, pervasive media marketing and public relations have transformed (and translated) the industrial flexibility inherent in the post-Fordist model into a broadly recognized public marker for cultural responsiveness. Second, the conglomerates have transformed the practices of narrowcasting difference and niche tiering by the major media brands into a public index of cultural diversity. This second strategy has been particularly effective in further positioning the conglomerates as de facto public trustees of the airwaves and media infrastructure. I am interested in these transformations for two reasons. Both tendencies humanize the conglomerates (despite runaway production, downsizing, political partisanship, and collusion) as benign. Both tendencies also extensively use reflexive on-screen texts about film and television production (promos, previews, behind-the-scenes, making-ofs, bonus tracks, and interextual programs) to achieve these transformations from economic control to cultural responsiveness and trusteeship. Texts and industrial reflexivity very much help sanction and legitimize the new conglomerates. How and why this happens is worth considering more fully.

At the heart of this textually driven legitimation process is the sense that conglomerates are not monoliths at all. At least they are not monoliths like the hardened, suspect, conglomerates of the turn-of-the-century robber barons, or of pre-divorcement Paramount, or of AT&T before it was finally broken up in the 1980s. “Affiliation,” rather than outright or complete ownership, defines many relationships within and with the conglomerates. Today's five superconglomerates do not tend to coerce or domineer to achieve their ends. Instead, they act “responsively” to affiliate, bend, negotiate, horse-trade, and provide “services” to the viewing and purchasing public. As Table 11.2 suggests, continual hard or soft re-affiliation makes conglomerates a moving target whose interests seem reasonably local rather than global in design.

As a result, competence at both negotiation and relationship building have become highly valued skill sets, not just for the agents and producers who constantly broker affiliations, but also for corporate units within the conglomerate who must master continuous, serial affiliations. The “art of the deal” rules precisely because conglomerates must master responsiveness as part of their business plans, corporate affect, and branding.

Consider how these five different types of flexible affiliation operate in but one major on-screen textual “event. In February 2002, Fox and the NFL, betraying no reluctance to take the lead in government policy making, declared the 2002 Super Bowl a “national holiday.” A mere five months after the national trauma of 9/11, this pronouncement launched a lengthy pregame show comprised of endless montages that melded the bared, muscular, chiaroscuro-lit bodies of pro football players with the sacrificial firemen and heroes of the World Trade Center inferno. A succession of former presidents from both parties then somberly recited passages of the Declaration of Independence on camera. This pantheon of elders was intercut with a succession of sports-government-society “hybrids”—including former NFL running back, Hollywood star, and urban activist Jim Brown, Vikings all-pro defensive tackle and now Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Jim Marshall, and Buffalo Bills quarterback and Reagan-Bush-era conservative congressman Jack Kemp—all of whom were swept along in the tide of a swelling Aaron Copland elegy. The televisual groundswell uncorked in this lengthy pregame show continued in each setup and break until halftime, when an ecstatic multimedia spectacle involving a cast of thousands evoked an aura of uniform political consensus. When Irishman Bono flashed an American flag as he ripped opened his leather jacket at the end of Fox's U2 halftime show, viewers had witnessed an excessively self-conscious and explicit disclosure of political commitment and collective cultural mastery by both government and the entertainment-industrial complex. The recombinant message gushing forth here fused gladiatorial masculinity, nationbuilding nostalgia, and political bravura with a “newfound” confidence in Manichean justice and American retribution. Of course, in American network television, even sobering political ecstasies like this rarely appear without the trappings of commerce. The Fox/NFL national holiday was no exception. Comforting commercial spots naturalized consumerism as the bedrock of an American way of life. In an update of Capra's Why We Fight series (1943–1945) sixty years earlier, the ad industry provided compelling evidence of the democracy-as-consumerism ideal that would soon be avenged militarily in the coming months. The cross-mediated culture industries had created a spectacular, on-screen high holiday, an unusually prominent opportunity for producers, ad executives, stars, writers, researchers, aging ex-jocks, and announcers to showcase the industry's critical acumen and intellectual stature as reluctant—but earnestly capable—historians and political scientists.

Reducing conglomerates solely to structures of control, profit, and power in moments of political “crisis like this, however, ignores the important ways that conglomerates pursue flexible affiliation and textual nuance to forge and reinforce consensus uber alles. In the Fox/NFL variant of nation rebuilding and showcased consensus, reflexive televisual forms became the very site of exchange that tied industry to culture, at least on important matters like the “war on terrorism and professional football. Thrown into the on-screen mix sponsored by E-Trade's corporate sponsoring logo was political liberal Bono posing as flag-waving U.S. patriot. This linkage textually tied U2 and the New York City Fire Department to Wall Street as part of “E-Trade's NFL Super Bowl Halftime Show. A gyrating Britney Spears made a pastiche of the entire history of Pepsi's corporate brand in a succession of commercial spots, which somehow helped fuel the Bush-rebranded American as a rightous avenger poised to strike back against the “axis of evil.” This eclectic textual package operated as part of the Fox network's and the NFL's joint rebranding campaign of themselves as unofficial but important and de facto parts of the U.S. federal government.24

Hard textual affiliations operative in Fox's “national holiday” involved the long-term, local affiliate stations that make up the Fox television network broadcasting the Super Bowl. It is important to note that many of these local affiliates are not permanent members of the News Corporation conglomerate. Several of the stations had actually been local CBS affiliates before Fox outbid CBS and won the right to broadcast NFL games in the early 1990s (a move widely seen as a way for Fox to “steal” existing stations and to build its national network). The multiyear contract between the NFL and Fox also functions as a hard affiliation and allowed Fox to shamelessly recycle the entire montage described above for use in its February 6, 2005, Super Bowl broadcast. Modifications were made to the footage in the later broadcast to make it more appropriate for the two-term Republican administration now in place. This restaged crisis mode, in effect, allowed Fox and the NFL to exploit the recent South Asian tsunami tragedy by having both former presidents Clinton and Bush in studio to solicit donations. The device worked to make Fox and the NFL bigger than either political party, and bigger than either the blue or red states.

Soft textual affiliations in Fox's national holiday include the extensive number of commercial spots sold for the highest ad rates of the year. Super Bowl telecasts are typically seen as the most important showcases for ad agency talent and corporate promotion, and 2002 was no exception. Britney Spears's “retro” emulation of the “entire” history of television ads for the Pepsi brand underscored the ad-centric nature of the spectacle, and endless news and showbiz reports during the weeks before and after the event continued to deliberate on the quality and significance of such ads. Ad purchases function as soft and temporary affiliations because they are based on a pay-to-play scheme hammered out over five decades in commercial U.S. network television. The process of cycling through thousands of ad-spot buys during a single programming year cultivates the idea in the public's mind that each conglomerate is permeable, agnostic, responsive to consumers, and nonpolitical.

Bet-hedging textual affiliations are pursued when a conglomerate is unsure about the prospects and outcomes of competition between two or more potential client companies. Such affiliations sometimes result in the simultaneous purchase of interests in competing companies. To minimize risk, management simply buys both companies, ensuring that the eventual winner in a narrow industrial sector will be within the buyer's conglomerate for the long term. Classic examples of this flexible relationship strategy occurred when NBC bought interests in both TiVo and Direct TV in 2000, thereby ensuring that whichever company eventually won the DVR wars would add value to the NBC brand. Bet-hedging flexibility also results when two competing conglomerates invest in the same media property. This ensures that if the purchased company does in fact become profitable and viable, the benefits from the co-owned property stream back to each conglomerate and are not hoarded by a single conglomerate. This scenario unfolded when competitors Viacom and Time Warner/AOL each bought 50 percent of the stock in up-and-coming cable network Comedy Central. Universal also took this approach when it co-invested with competitor Viacom in funding the start-up of the Sundance Channel, and when Disney co-invested in A&E with competing conglomerate General Electric. This result is a kind of Mexican standoff but also guarantees at least a conservative return for the investment, one that prevents competitors from running off with inordinate profits after a risky cable start-up. Fox's on-screen 2002 national holiday text incorporated several of these ambivalent affiliations and bet-hedging flourishes. This included the calculated inclusion of former presidents or their stand-ins from both parties (Jimmy Carter and Clinton as well as George Bush and Nancy Reagan). As with the in-studio appearance of both Clinton and the elder Bush in Fox's 2005 Super Bowl, professional sports superbrands (like the NFL) and their broadcast franchises (Fox) need to establish an ecumenical response to political partisanship—to appear “above the fray—thus underscoring their commercial reach. Once again, these affiliations posture the conglomerate as fair-minded and open to the will of “all” people.

Legacy textual affiliations involve fortuitous linkages between corporations caused by the migration, departure, or arrival of executives or other instrumental figures who bring with them valuable, established reputations. Such personnel or boardroom migrations can bring to new conglomerates the brand aura of the old employer, even if such symbolic transfer is unintended. One calculated example of legacy affiliation transpired when up-and-coming Pixar animation brought in “visionary Steve Jobs as its CEO and public face in the 1990s. This move essentially stripped off some of Jobs's wunderkind persona and Apple's aura of brand quality to help legitimize the Pixar start-up in the minds of Wall Street traders. Yahoo! pursued a similar tactic, establishing that it would survive the 2000 dot-com meltdown, when it hired former Warner Bros. executive Terry Semel to run the company in 2001. The trades marveled that “Semel's appointment continues the Internet's love affair with Hollywood and comes as Yahoo! has aggressively spent the past year trying to expand its site beyond serving solely as a portal for news and information and grow into a major entertainment player of music, movies, and other original content.”25

Like every other dot-com, Yahoo! was in trouble. The company solved its financial decline by trying to remake itself on the lines of “old media”—the Hollywood studios. With a barrage of on-screen public relations texts to manage the union, the resulting “marriage” was largely symbolic. Yet the event did have the effect of offering dot-com stockholders an economically viable, long-standing business model tried and proven by Hollywood. By 2005, Yahoo! went further, shored up this initial legacy affiliation, and embarked on significant expansion of its industrial activities in the Los Angeles area. Fox's 2002 national holiday exploited a succession of legacy appearances in its melodramatic montage and lengthy pregame homage. Typical of most sports coverage, the on-camera reporters and commentators had journeyman career status and brought these other identities with them to Fox as the broadcast weighed in on everything from football to the nature of evil. Golden-lit shots of former football players and politicians Gerald Ford and Jack Kemp suggested that the presidency and Congress might actually have been intermediate way stations on the road to football acumen, or vice versa. Slow tracking shots of the Declaration of Independence made the gridiron a reiteration of the American Revolution. Numerous close-ups of American flags, along with tattered flags from the World Trade Center disaster, made the Super Bowl seem like a natural extension of the memorials mounted after 9/11. Legacy affiliation works by importing established identities and recognizable symbols that add value to the producing and importing companies. The kind of on-screen demeanor that results poses the conglomerate as fully aware of real-world events and full of empathy for those in the “real world” (outside of professional sports) that actually suffer. The 2005 Super Bowl broadcast embellished News Corporation as a feeling, sensitive super-empath.

Contingent textual affiliations are purely opportunistic linkages promoted by the marketing and public relations departments of the various corporate entities participating in a given media event or spectacle. Moments of local or national crisis provide particularly good opportunities for various forms of contingent affiliation and grandstanding. The violent uprising in Los Angeles in 1992, and the second American invasion of Iraq in spring 2003, provided particularly good occasions for secondary entities to make the primary conflagration part of their own institutional identity and history. Unlike legacy affiliations, which involve tangible forms of appropriation by corporations, contingent affiliations tend to erupt in more ad hoc ways, and from various directions. This is because contingent affiliations can be made by almost any entity in the spatial or temporal proximity of the event being staged, the spectacle being covered, or the crisis being managed. While Fox may arguably have real relations with the American flag, it had absolutely none with the New York fire fighters killed trying to rescue World Trade Center victims. Nevertheless, the New York City Fire Department served as on-screen iconic fodder in Fox's football montage.

But many other affiliations were rapidly asserted by entities adjacent to Fox as well. U2's halftime performance was not simply evidence of international solidarity with the United States. It was big-time mass marketing for the Irish band's recently released album. Bono was using Fox's national holiday to redefine himself as an edgy American-flag-draped patriot. E-Trade sponsored Bono's halftime show, but not just for a temporary pay-to-play affiliation with Fox. After the NASDAQ crash and 9/11, Wall Street itself was a question mark, and E-Trade was affiliating with Fox's national holiday to resuscitate and rebrand itself, and Wall Street by proxy. With her career fading, Janet Jackson exploited the frenzied 2004 halftime show televised two years later by exposing her breast to viewers nationwide. The controversy and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fines that followed spiked interest again in her career and music, which had slowly diminished with each year's emerging teen audience.

Fox's 2002 national holiday also functioned as an extension of George W. Bush's new “war on terrorism. Fox had essentially aped and domesticated the incendiary rhetoric that Bush had been speaking since 9/11 to marshal the forces of good and patriotism to fight what the president repeatedly referred to as the “axis of evil.” In this sense, the 2002 Super Bowl national holiday was not a fabrication of the Fox/News Corporation conglomerate at all. Rather, the Super Bowl spectacle, its lengthy nostalgia-infused montages and self-consciously sobered pregame shows, were actually outgrowths of a social script that had already been written by President Bush. Bush had conveniently affiliated with the morale-boosting televisual spectacle of the Super Bowl, but not by appearing live. Instead, he had chartered the very terms of a new, highly moral worldview; one with clear moral choices, and a system of good and evil that could be ably worked by the media and nonmedia conglomerates that would rush to support the coming invasion of Iraq.

Sanctioning the Monolith 2: Conglomeration's “Public Service” Persona

The sorts of complex affiliation practices involving texts that I have just described posture the conglomerate as flexible, nuanced, and therefore responsive to changing industrial and cultural conditions. Another set of textual-organizational practices sells the public on the idea that conglomerates have a public service persona by showing that diversity of taste (and therefore of representation) are at the heart of the enterprise. Cultural legitimacy follows from this, since both screen practices and the business models that generate them pose the conglomerate as a market-driven, quasi—public service enterprise. The advent of new programming and delivery systems beginning in the 1980s—cable, direct broadcast satellite, pay-per-view, the VCR and remote, the Internet, and broadband—helped break the oligopoly of three-network television and opened American television screens to many more emerging companies.26 To many, the success of HBO, CNN, MTV, VH1, Discovery, Cinemax, USA Network, BET, Nickelodeon, American Movie Classics, Lifetime, the Sci-Fi Network, Bravo, ESPN, Fox Sports Net, the History Channel, Home and Garden, and many other “networks had splintered the mass audience into multiple niches, now somehow more responsive to divergent audience perspectives. This splintering also ostensibly disassembled the top-down control of American broadcasting in a way that publicly favored the diverse, heterogeneous identities of the American public. Fiscal conservatives in government at this time spread the mantra of the television industry and the National Association of Broadcasters: a free market—not regulation—was the only way to ensure diversity of programming. For three administrations beginning with the Reagan/Bush White House, government regulation by the FCC and FTC retreated to enable the telecommunications industry and entertainment market to work their democratic miracles. Across a broad spectrum of interests, diversity in channel choices was optimistically conflated with cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity per se.27 Yet few looked past the hype to challenge a subsequent trend. After the multichannel market model rose to prominence, and regulatory policy withered, merger mania caught up with those in the expanding cable-television-entertainment industries.28 While some hand-wringing greeted this renewed form of “vertical integration” long absent since the 1948 Paramount decrees (which prohibited a single corporation from owning each stage of the media cycle; from production, to distribution, to exhibition and broadcast), the new megacong-lomerates such as AOL/Time Warner reestablished and legitimized vertical integration with a vengeance.29 And they did so with the blessing of the very same government that had—in the name of public interest—aggressively abolished vertical integration five decades earlier.30

Programming Difference and Multicultural Tiering

This reversal and sanction emerged in part because the new corporations became particularly good at “performing identity” in ways reminiscent of how “resisting” and “subaltern” subjects perform identity in critical theory and cultural studies. In some ways, multiculturalism, identity performance, and hybridity became foundational principles in media programming practice. The continuing green light given entertainment mergers and reconglomeration follows from the fact that these new vertically reintegrated conglomerates have symbolically mastered the very regime of diversity, public service, and democratic taste that regulatory limits were set in place to preserve for the past half century. However, rather than dispersing taste niches and community viewpoints across competing channels, the new conglomerates have mastered the ability to house and segregate this diverse pantheon of tastes and perspectives within components or tiers of the very same conglomerate. Viacom can thereby prove that it meets the needs of the youthful MTV/VH1 demographic, the African American target audience of BET, queer and lesbian viewers on Showtime, as well as the mainstream and older demographic tastes of CBS. Viacom also demonstrates to its shareholders and to governmental regulators that it is profitably diverse and inclusive, even as the industry champions its market-driven diversity.31 As a result, economic rewards that used to follow from a program's mass audience share no longer stand as realistic corporate goals. The success of narrowcasting as a programming strategy in the 1980s is said to have ended the economies of scale that defined the network era. Media corporations now must try to master the cumulative aggregation of audiences from across the fragmented demographic niches that compromise the proliferating multichannel market.

Narrowcasting succeeded because of its ability to return lucrative, niche demographic segments of the audience to program suppliers and networks who could, as a result, charge higher advertising rates to more loyal consumers. The current media conglomerates, however, can no longer sufficiently capitalize their operations by exploiting solely this kind of limited economy of scope. Instead, large media companies seek to incorporate diversity and cultural difference (and their attendant revenues) by combining them within a single, integrated corporate structure. The dispersed flows and migrations that I have characterized above—of both texts and viewers—produces highly fragmented revenue streams. Since this kind of fragmentation is difficult to associate with single-brand identity, corporations such as AOL/Time Warner/HBO/Showtime/CNN/Turner now specialize in “tiering” numerous brand-inflected niches within the uberbrand. HBO now charges cable and satellite users a gradation of premiums for no less than sixteen “different channel “tiers. There is no need to go to Lifetime or Oxygen when women viewers have HBO Signature; no need to go to IFC, Bravo, or the Sundance Channel when cineastes and aesthete viewers can see “cutting-edge,” vanguard film on HBO Zone; no need to go to the Disney Channel or Pax TV when children have HBO Family; no need to switch to BET when African Americans are sold on critically acclaimed depictions of African Americans on HBO (or its competitive brand Showtime, in series like Soul Food); no need to switch to general cable channels like MSNBC, either, when HBO news viewers can switch instead to Turner's CNN, an important affiliate in the HBO conglomerate. This industry loves to analyze how markets guarantee diversity: “Today's Big Five offer a stunning array of programming for just about every taste. And somehow, despite the big corporate ownership, they offer a lot of different viewpoints on a lot of different topics. To the extent those viewpoints are limited is due as much to government and public pressure as to corporate decision making. It's the gay rights groups that are driving Dr. Laura off the air, not Viacom.”32

Individual media conglomerates have attempted to engineer the mannerisms of the multichannel universe within or inside of the branded walls of the conglomerate. Brands in the digital era are expected to function in far more extensive and complex ways than they were in the analog age. During the earlier period, a limited set of basic product and trademark names functioned as brands, whose ad agencies sponsored mass-audience television shows in the network era. Branding has now an obligatory specialization, requiring continual re-inflection as technological, market, and regulatory changes ripple through the industry. Branding markets not specific products, but rather highly individuated and easily recognizable corporate personalities. Branding is lauded if it effectively creates psychological and empathic relationships with consumers. HBO and its ubercon-glomerate have proliferated variants of the mother brand, which invoke cultural difference without straying from the “emotional core of the original brand. The AOL/Time Warner/HBO brand is so complicated that most Web sites within the conglomerate provide either linkages to other corporate affiliates, or schematic descriptions, maps, and user guides that help the Web user understand his or her location within the überbrand. Such practices show that conglomerates have imposed and adapted flow strategies intended to work inside of their proprietary and newly aggregated worlds. Internalizing flow strategy in this way is no small task, given that viewer migrations now flow multidirectionally across potentially endless numbers of channels and niches. As a marketing and public relations goal, the proliferation of choices within the conglomerate brand demonstrates the corporation's ostensible commitment to cultural diversity and, through it, the sense that the corporation is “serving” the public (Table 11.3).

My characterization of intrabrand flows in this essay, of course, is in some ways a boardroom fantasy of corporations. What actually occurs in television network usage is that unruly users migrate in all sorts of directions that can only be loosely encouraged and facilitated with incentives, rather than controlled in any uniform sense. In comparison to the tight and heavy-handed management of flows that takes place in traditional “first-shift” programming (officially scheduled half-hour- or hour-long series on television or cable and first-run feature films screened in theaters), the looser flows of “second-shift” programming (mobile and dispersed media activities linked to the primary shows or films but accessed at times other than the primary screenings) live or die by obsessively pursuing and mastering endless forms of flexibility and nuance.33 Online, HBO is willing to provide minimal links to its affiliates outside of HBO (with links to “free AOL service,” to AOL Box Office, and to Turner's Cartoon Network, for example). Other entities try to partner and cobrand to steer users to corporations with shared economic interests—even if they are in different sectors of the economy. NBC could viably partner with Microsoft (MSNBC) but not HBO, and could create a portal with Snap.com and then ShopNBC rather than AOL. But even these alliances “leak on the Internet. This inherent leakiness in flow management means that cable executives now strategize (and program) degrees of textual “stickiness” in the second-shift world (with stickiness being the extent to which providers can induce users to stay with a package of services). At the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) convention on May 15, 2002, management panelists all concurred that the notion of hom*ogenous content “convergence is, in many ways, a myth. Chief executive officers from Time Warner Cable, AT&T cable, Charter Communications, and others asserted that viewer “churn” (the rate that subscribers canceled paid service) improved only when companies provided a package of different services within a single delivery system (video, data, telephony, enhanced TV, etc.).34

The CEO of Wink Communications (an “enhanced TV provider) summed up the insight that higher customer satisfaction came from packaging different services and thus “creating value on a single platform.”35 In some ways this notion (of diverse-packaging/singular-delivery) mirrors the ways that branding (in the age of digital) works by producing diversity and difference within a single uberbrand. But textual dispersal and flow leakiness also mean that content providers must now learn looser forms of management to master programming in the second shift. Other interests and sites—including competing networks—can (and regularly do) pull users out of branded confines. Following the pattern established by CBS's Survivor phenomenon, reality shows like ABC's The Bachelor provided Disney with intrabrand flow and tie-in possibilities. But as each female contestant was exiled from the show, many other news and entertainment shows aired by local stations or in first-run syndication (Extra, Entertainment Tonight) also solicited and then showcased the banished contestants as part of their own proprietary special segments.36

Diversity of on-screen representation now exists in television—but only because of genre and format “ghettoizations” that the multichannel conglomerates have established and profited from.37 The industry has been particularly good at deflecting criticism about lack of public service and diversity by arguing that it now provides greater access to a wider range of groups and perspectives than ever before. Two factors are conveniently left out of this rationale, however: first, that niche ghettoization allows the majors (CBS, ABC, NBC) to be no less appreciably white than they have been for two decades (and to be that way without regulatory pressure); and second, that the new conglomerates actually prosper by institutionalizing a regime of difference in the form of corporate-affiliate tiering. One underlying objective of each new conglomerate is to have within the walls of its extended corporate family a programming niche for every taste, culture, and social identity. Even as specific networks and studios may become more specialized and hom*ogenous within their own narrow scope and identity; the larger conglomerates that house them are tiered as multicultural aggregations. Such aggregation deflects both claims of racism and concerned calls for new regulatory measures to enforce public service, diversity, and democratic representation. The entertainment industries have every reason to internalize and corporatize such ideals as part of a global, some would say user-driven, multimedia market.38

Why Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Self-Representation Matter to Conglomerates

Conglomeration can be productively understood by examining the on-screen critical textual practices of the film and video production industry. Contemporary media corporations deploy various forms of industrial reflexivity to pursue their goals of diversification, managerial flexibility, and synergy. On-screen representations (of the production world made by the production world) guide the viewer as he or she deciphers and navigates the many channel options available in the multimedia environment. Successful modern media conglomerates succeed not by isolating and locking onto consumers in traditional or discrete media categories. Rather, media conglomerates today are effective only to the degree that they can manage and loosely guide user-viewers in two increasingly common situations: first, as they “flow” and cycle from one multimedia platform to another; and second, as they “multitask.”39

In a flurry of deals in spring 2006, most of the major U.S. studios and television networks had launched new media initiatives to exploit and manage this new kind of second-shift flow and multitasking phenomenon. Disney's ABC and News Corporation's Fox both developed off-network mob-casts with cell phone companies for Desperate Housewives and 24, respectively. CBS loaded up its new site Innertube.cbs.com with episodes of Survivor: Exile Island, Amazing Race 9, and making-of interviews with casts of most CBS's broadcast series. Comedy Central's site motherload.comedycentral.com provides an online smorgasbord of such hits as South Park and The Daily Show, original stand-up comedy acts, and online video shorts that can be downloaded onto an iPod. Universal/NBC/Bravo's bril-liantbutcancelled.com site created a second-shift strategy based entirely on programming detritus from television's first shift—resuscitating programs that choked prematurely in some other network's prime time. MTV's overdrive .mtv.com, VH1s vspot.vh1.com, and SciFi's scifi.com/pulse all stoked their network servers with backstory, minutiae, series deconstructions, and mountains of programming surplus aimed at keeping their respective fans and viewers forever preoccupied and away from some other studio's first-shift offerings. These now-obligatory business strategies underscore the importance of three related factors: first, the economic importance of on-screen textual permutation and reiteration rationalized within a system of content repurposing; second, the institutional value that various forms of textual affiliation and development flexibility play in enabling conglomerates to rapidly deploy creative resources and externalize risk; and third, the ways that industrial reflexivity and practitioner self-commentary are symptoms of adaptive behaviors generated in response to structural uncertainties. For many film and video practitioners, metatexts, demos, and reflexive rituals help workers adapt, navigate, and negotiate very real threats of industrial change and technical obsolescence. For the large media conglomerates, by contrast, reflexive on-screen content provides a different kind of adaptive behavior—what economist Arthur De Vany would call an “information cascade needed to promote and assign “extraordinary” status for the films or series being depicted.40 Hit films are highly extraordinary and rare. Reflexive information cascades help reduce the great uncertainty that defines the content development process. Many of the reflexive industrial artifacts that make up information cascades (studio or network Web sites, DVDs and video games spun off from films) also help the conglomerates dynamically follow or “track” the transitory, unpredictable viewer or fan.41

By the early 2000s, mastery of on-screen reflexivity and deconstruction became obligatory goals in content development. After a succession of reality-show successes based on audience participation in the real-time “making-of a multi-platformed media property—like WB's Popstars and MTV's Making the Band— several series pushed the concept across the full range of multimedia possibilities.42 Project Greenlight/Stolen Summer was launched as a contest for unknown but aspiring screenwriter/directors “with an edge. In an event that synthesized a lottery, the Sundance Film Festival, and gen-Y fantasies of becoming “players” in the entertainment industry, financial backers Miramax studios, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon awarded unknown first-timer Pete Jones a million-dollar budget to produce his screenplay/entry as the feature film Stolen Summer. HBO (and then Bravo, in syndication) then covered every blow-by-blow of the disaster that followed “behind the camera for its weekly prime-time series Project Greenlight. Far more than a “making-of, HBO scored a major hit with the on-the-set soap opera. The result: a weekly melodrama involving endless displays of production and directorial incompetence, cathartic raging, infighting, interpersonal jealousies, backstabbings, firings, and studio and executive damage control. By the time Stolen Summer premiered to mixed and unenthusiastic reviews at Sundance in January 2002, the lessons were clear. First, the traditional aesthetic hierarchy had been turned upside down: Time Warner/AOL's cable network HBO succeeded in making “ancillary” content (a “making-of “) the main event, while theatrical film exhibition (of Jones's feature film) became but an afterthought. Second, the marketing and management arms of the conglomerate had effectively demonstrated their own critical competence (and their grasp of complex, multimarket media productions) to the viewing public as the production process unfolded in weekly installments. Ostensible “stars” Jones, Affleck, Damon, and others gradually faded under the shadow of the mostly offscreen higher-ups, especially Miramax's quiet but knowing executive-aesthetes who pulled strings during key story sessions, production summits, and confrontations in Project Greenlight. This lengthy exercise in extended self-dissection and implicitly “insightful screen analysis supported the thrust of HBO's ever-present corporate branding motto (“It's not television. It's HBO.”). Where, however, does one attribute authorship in this multimedia initiative? Is it the director of the Project Greenlight cable television series? Is it the director of the Stolen Summer film? Is it the on-camera producer who badgers and ridicules Jones in every episode of the series and every stage of production? Or could it be the director of HBO's marketing department, the designer of HBO's script solicitation and series-related Web site, or the Weinstein honchos in Miramax's executive offices? In the age of multi-affiliated, multi-platformed media content, corporate brands like HBO themselves regularly function as auteurs. Clearly, an off-screen authority has self-consciously choreographed and organized a complicated set of cross-media production registers over several years (the online selection process, the weekly televisual experience, and the cinematic spectacle) and across numerous corporate institutions.

Even as the film went down in flames, HBO provided a successful paradigm that many others would soon master. By staging a long-term multimedia experience and acting as its own critical analyst as well, HBO, much like a critic or historian, ably mined the backstory, behind-the-camera “realities,” and presentational “secrets” of the developing content (the film production)—and presented this critical analysis as the viewer's primary form of on-screen content. Web-television-film hybrids like this, and the technologies and affiliations that animate them, now function as trading grounds not just for commerce and consumption but for industrial authorship and critical analysis as well. This symptomatic pose—the self-critical conglomerate—would have ill fit the network-era logic of oligopoly and dominance. Brilliantbutcancelled.com allows armchair critics to beg for the death of hated series in a show called Make it Stop. SciFi.com/pulse enables its viewers to give the corporation feedback on pilots the network is developing. Innertube.com programs an online second-shift series where desperate actors compete for a chance to appear on CBS's first-shift series As the World Turns. Comedy Central's Motherload makes viewers the judges of series pilots submitted by viewers in an American Idol-like Web series entitled Test Pilots.

In each of these cases, traditional distinctions used by media scholars have blurred. Each site and platform melds viewing, online use, critical analysis, media production, and marketing into a single hybrid entertainment experience. While the aesthetic effect is one of complex mutation, the corporate effect is clearer and more systematic. Industrial textual practices serve to publicly “rationalize (in two senses of the term) the work worlds of media conglomeration. First, they provide a metric and logic to the industrial mode of production (ground rules that help order the volatile industrial landscape). The amortized, cross-collateralized textual economy described earlier (in which films and series are financed by dispersing production costs across numerous affiliated partners and distribution windows within the multimedia conglomerate, and in which various off- and online media cross-promote one another) helps provide this rationality. Such a scheme allows corporations and their investors to more accurately value and appraise individual projects. This, in turn, allows the companies to be more systematic in selecting and capitalizing new projects. Contractually reaggregated, newly networked affiliates within the new conglomerates provide predictability in designing marketing plans and in projecting profits—both crucial tasks in the risk-defined, failure-prone world of content development. This cross-collateralization and multimedia diversification is pushing film production further into the realm (and economic scheme) of television. After all, for five decades U.S. television has: (1) distributed production costs and risks across affiliated partners; and (2) systematically used audience and market research and analysis to produce less volatile business plans than film (this conservative scheme is based on the predictability of advertising sponsorship, merchandising, and long-term licensing fees). Long ago, television mastered on-screen programming and scheduling as a key business strategy. Programming is dynamic enough to adapt to market uncertainty, and predictable enough to build long-range plans around. Programming departments in turn enabled television to find and manage audience flow much more effectively than cinema. For these reasons, I would characterize the economic logic and less dynamic managerial system of television, in an economist's terminology, as a “mediocracy. Television stands, after all, in stark contrast to what De Vany described as the far more “dynamic behaviors and outcome “uncertainties that have historically defined feature film's “extraordinary” economy.

I have added a number of related distinctions to De Vany's that can be made between the economic and institutional behaviors of film and television conglomerates in Table 11.4. As feature film is gradually incorporated, disciplined, and rationalized as but a single node within giant multimedia conglomerates (which are in turn dominated by television, digital, and electronic media activities), film will increasingly emulate strategies of effective television programming to do what it needs to do to survive as film. That is, conglomerates pressure their film units to more responsively follow audiences, in order to harvest their transient financial resources. The new conglomerates, in effect, favor television's research-based industrial rationality over film's historic, personality-driven, roll-of-the-dice fatalism.

Showbiz reports, making-ofs, video press kits, ancillary digital forms, and DVDs now all (ostensibly) reveal the mode of production. Reflexive artifacts and specials of the sort examined throughout this essay regularly provide charged “glimpses” of competing interests and proprietary “secrets” behind film and television content development. These mediated forms of rationality are more than simply indications of generational and educational changes in audience competence (a notion assuming more media savvy, cultural capital, and aesthetic sophistication on the part of viewers, who now somehow care about film and video production complexities). Critical, mediated, industrial “self-disclosures like these secondary textual forms and genres function institutionally in several ways. First, as “critical proofs,” reflexive industrial artifacts verify that some other referenced or depicted primary text (film or series) is complicated, significant, valuable, or profitable. Second, as staged disclosures and “company confessions,” reflexive industrial artifacts frequently demonstrate that participants in the production of films or series are ostensibly aware of the contexts, social issues, and (infrequently) political forces that impact their work worlds. Third, and finally, as “legitimating mechanisms,” reflexive industrial artifacts explain and so normalize and sanction the very industrial changes outlined in this essay: conglomeration, deregulation, market segregation, branding, and tiering.

Sumner Redstone surprised Wall Street in April 2005 by promising to “split” the giant Viacom conglomerate into two megacompanies, “ViaSlow” (CBS, UPN, Infinity Radio, and Paramount TV) and “ViaGrow” (MTV, VH1, Showtime, Paramount Studios, and Paramount Home Video/DVD). The trades jumped at the chance to claim that this meant a halt in the unending march to ever-larger conglomeration. Broadcasting and Cable claimed that the split meant an end to “synergy, that quaint notion that companies make more money when different divisions collaborate.”43 In reality, all the split really meant was that Redstone's stock options would be more valuable under the new model, which would allow the surging value of Viacom's cable networks to complement the merely steady growth of Viacom's broadcasting and syndication arms in investor's portfolios. Far from ending, inside dealing would continue among Viacom's units even as the new Universal/NBC conglomerate achieved an even more massive scale during the very same period. In May 2005, B&C used the “upfronts” (the spring announcements of the fall schedule designed to lure advertisers) to argue that “vertical integration in the television market had been “opened up now that networks were buying some shows from other conglomerates.44 In reality, all of UPN's new series, and two-thirds of CBS's new series came from Viacom's own Paramount Television, while the WB network bought three-quarters of its new series from sibling Warner Bros.45 Trade news to the contrary, vertical integration was not ending; nor was inside dealing. Yet B&C, a tenacious antiregulatory organization for the better part of a century, used any evidence, no matter how fleeting, to establish the “fairness” of “market-driven” conglomeration. Once again, a flurry of industrial metatexts—Viacom's press campaign, the carnivalesque spectacle of the network upfronts, onscreen making-ofs, showbiz reports, and the trades, which perpetually clarify and interpret industrial events—hyped change even as they methodically legitimized the status quo. Industrial spin and on-screen reflexivity notwithstanding, the age of “de-conglomeration” is far from upon us.46 The Viacom/VH1 and Universal/Bravo/Trio reflexive programming that opened up this essay provide far more prescient insights about conglomeration than either Broadcasting and Cable or Sumner Redstone.

Notes

Bibliography

Metrics

View Metrics

More from Oxford Academic