Media Mergers Quotes

I started in investment banking at Allen & Company in 1991. It was the go-go days of media mergers, and we were incredibly busy with one deal after another. Unlike typical investment banking groups, even in the midst of merger mania, we didn't have a formal face-time culture - and I felt empowered by that.

People often ask why I left CNN - I didn't like management. I liked my colleagues in the news gathering but the corporate culture that seized management when AOL came in (Steve Case and Gerry Levin) was disgusting.

From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.com.

Twenty years ago, there were dozens and dozens of independent television producers. There are a couple now, at the most. Mark Burnett, Endemol. It's gone. Everybody works for the Man now. And it's natural law, how that happened: Nobody prescribed it, but it's how things worked out and how it has been for decades, period.

It's easy to make fun of AOL's pending purchase of HuffPo. Just like AOL's purchase of TimeWarner, here we have a new media company - Huffington Post - fooling an old media company, AOL, into overpaying for something that has already peaked.

It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity.

One thing that I would like the market to appreciate more is the difference between Disney and other media companies.

I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysenery.