[Reprinted without permission but without violation of copyright laws from the Dec 1992 issue of _Multinational Monitor_, which allows reproduction for non-commercial use if proper credit is given. All rights reserved.] TIME WARNER/WHITTLE SELLING KIDS SHORT THE $7 BILLION MERGER of media giants Time, Inc. and Warner Communications in early 1990 marks a significant and dangerous stage in the drive toward increasing concentration of the media. Time Warner now owns and controls mass circulation magazines such as Time and Fortune; publishing houses including Time-Life Books, Warner Books, Little Brown and the Book-of-the-Month Club; two of the largest pay-television services in the United States, HBO and Cinemax; two of the largest cable-operating companies in the United States; music publishing companies including Warner Brothers, Atlantic and Elektra; and Warner Brothers Studios in the film industry. Time Warner owns a 22 percent interest in the Turner Broadcasting System, the parent company of CNN. The company has also recently begun testing a mammoth cable system in Queens, New York to provide a record 150 channels of programming and interactive services such as electronic banking. The huge company is entering into joint agreements around the world to produce movies, open movie theaters, manufacture and market compact discs and videos, even to develop cable television in Hungary. The merger of the two companies had the usual effect on the staff: in September 1991, Time Warner laid off 600 magazine employees, including 19 of 75 correspondants at Time magazine, according to the New York-based media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). At the same time, Warner chair Steve Ross was the most highly compensated chief executive in the United States, with a salary and stock option package worth more than $78 million in 1990. FAIR executive director Jeff Cohen questions about the ability of Time Warner employees to report fairly on business in the wake of the merger and the layoffs. He says, "You can't expect reporters working at Time Warner--no matter how valiant--to give working people the information they need about the dangers of mergers and business monopolies when they're working for one and they've just seen their colleagues laid off." Cohen also notes that as a result of the merger, the company now both owns cable stations and distributors and produces the product that will get on the air; Time Warner also owns magazines that review movies and televisions shows that it produces. Cohen cites a Time cover story on author Scott Turow which ran just as Warner released a movie based on a Turow novel. Critics of media concentration have more profound concerns about the mergers of huge companies like Time and Warner, charging that corporate giants will control the international flow of information to reflect and promote their own interests, and exist only to exploit information for profit."Concentrated power to persuade and influence is dangerous," says Cohen. "That's a given." Time Warner has already thrown its muscle behind a particularly disturbing enterprise to push a noxious mixture of media, education and commercialism. In 1992, Time Warner became majority owner of Whittle Communications, with an option to buy an additional 20 percent of Christopher Whittle's communications company. Whittle is the most blatant and well-known of the new breed of classroom hucksters, companies that view elementary and high school students as prime targets for marketing schemes. Whittle produces Channel One, a television news program beamed daily via satellite to 6.6 million teenagers in classrooms in over 9,000 high schools. In exchange for receiving free satellite dishes, video equipment and televisions from Whittle, schools agree to air the 12-minute program, two minutes of which consists of commercials hawking products such as Skittles candy and Nike sneakers. In January 1991, the National Parents and Teachers Association (PTA) approved a set of principles to guide state and local education agencies in their relationships with corporations. The principles, based on the recognition that "compulsory education confers on educators an obligation to protect the welfare of their students and the integrity of the learning environment," challenged schools' acceptance of Channel One: "Selling or providing access to a captive audience in the classroom for commercial purposes is exploitation and a violation of the public trust." Whittle, backed by Time Warner, is currently planning a much more profound and insidious assault on public schools. The company's "Edison Project" is scheming to set up a system of 200 private for-profit schools by 1996. Whittle has managed to lure former Yale University president Benno Schmidt to lead the project, lending it dangerous credibility. Karen Brown of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for the Study of Commercialism says, "We are very wary of a money-making corporation deciding the curriculum for children. Clearly, the bottom line for a company like Whittle may not serve the best interest of U.S. children." Whittle's current "educational" methods certainly do not bode well for the type of education the Edison Project may offer. As Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television, told the Monitor, if the Edison Project goes through, classrooms may exist "just to give the kids a place to sit" while they watch Whittle television. The Edison Project may represent "the beginning of the downfall of education in America," says Charren.