[includes Bagdikian's related profiles of Rupert Murdoch, Reinhard Mohn, Robert Maxwell and Jean-Luc Lagardere]

[Much has changed on the global scene since 1989. Newspapers and television chains have changed hands. Owners have died. But "The Lords of the Global Village" remains a classic in international communication.]

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan promulgated the idea of a new "global village": a world knit together and transformed by television and other marvels of the electronic age.

His popular book, Understanding Media, predicted that an information network would envelop the planet, spreading democracy and leading to"a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity . . . a general cosmic consciousness."

The global village is growing. Glasnost in the SovietUnion, stirrings in Eastern Europe and demands for openness in China allrespond in real measure to images of freedom and dignity transmitted by the penetrating networks foreseen by McLuhan. But in recent years there have grown other networks designed to penetrate the world with messages far from the enlightenment and openness of "a generalcosmic consciousnes."

A handful of mammoth private organizations have begun to dominate the world's mass media. Most of them confidently announce that by the1990s they -- five to ten corporate giants -- will control most of the world's important newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast stations, movies, recordingsand videocassettes.

Moreover, each of these planetary corporations plans togather under its control every step in the information process, from creation of "the product" to all the various means by which modern technology delivers mediamessages to the public.

"The product" is news, information, ideas, entertainmentand popular culture; the public is the whole world. The driving force for all this is simple: these closed corporate circuits are worth staggering sums.

In 1979 the largest media merger in history was theGannett newspaper chain's purchase of a billboard and television company for $362 million. Nine years later, Rupert Murdoch bought TV Guide and other magazinesfrom Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications for $ 3 billion. Only seven months later, the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications Inc.created the world's largest media firm, worth $ 18 billion. On April 9, Gulf +Western (Simon & Schuster books and Paramount Pictures), once the country's mostdiversified conglomerate, announced that it was entering the global race byselling all its nonmedia industries in order to concentrate on the new gold mineof planetary media, and after nearly half a century was changing its name toParamount Communications Inc.

The men who run these empires are lords of the global village.

Some, like Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, are flamboyant figures known to much of the literate world. Some are so obscure that most Americans would be astonished tolearn that much of what they read is published by a quiet figure fromGiitersloh, West Germany. Others come and go in impersonal empires, in the gray anonymity that marks most large bureaucracies.

But whatever the style, this new media royalty is bent on capitalizing on global technological and political trends. New developments like fiber optics and satellites make it possible topublish and broadcast across the world's surface at ever greater speeds andlower costs. National boundaries grow increasingly meaningless: Already, theEncyclopedia Americana is published by the French, New American Library books by the British and the Encyclopaedia Britannica by Americans.

In many countries,particularly those in Western Europe, government broadcasting monopolies aregiving way to commercial operations with advertising increasingly aimed atmegamarkets that stretch across continents.

It is no accident that mediaconsolidation has paralleled a like trend among advertising agencies. The world's largest agency, Saatchi & Saatchi of London, has offices in eightycountries and buys 20 percent of the world's broadcast commercials, for clients like Procter & Gamble. Recently, the stock of the ad agency Ogilvy Group, one ofthe world's largest, rose 53 percent after a hostile takeover bid from the WPPGroup of London. With the deal complete, WPP would be the world's second largestagency, with billings of $ 13.5 billion and operations in fifty-three countries.

Combining the thrust of all these corporate forces produces economic power that dwarfs that of many nations. The newly wed Time Warner, for example, has a total value of $ 18 billion, more than the combined gross domestic products ofJordan, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Albania, Laos, Liberia and Mali.

And the corporate battle to dominate the international market is gathering momentum with theapproach of 1992, the year when the twelve nations of the European Community arescheduled to meld into a single economic unit of 320 million consumers. Their estimated annual combined spending power will be one of the highest in theworld, especially the unprecedented television audience. [See William Fisher andMark Schapiro, "Four Titans Carve Up European TV," The Nation, January 9/16 .]

The global media oligopoly is not visible to the eye of the consumer. Newsstands still display rows of newspapers and magazines in a dazzling variety of colors and subjects. Bookstores and libraries still offer miles of shelvesstocked with individual volumes. Throughout the world, broadcast and cablechannels continue to multiply, as do videocassettes and music recordings indozens of languages.

But if this bright kaleidoscope suddenly disappeared and was replaced by the corporate colophons of those who own this output, thecollage would go gray with the names of the few media multinationals that nowcommand the field.

This does not bode well for McLuhan's "universal understanding."

The lords of the global village have their own political agenda. All resist economic changes that do not support their own financial interests. Together, they exert a homogenizing power over ideas, culture and commerce that affects populations larger than any in history.

Neither Caesar nor Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt norany Pope, has commanded as much power to shape the information on which so many people depend to make decisions about everything from whom to vote for to what to eat. As the world heads into the last decade of the twentieth century, five mediacorporations dominate the fight for the hundreds of millions of minds in theglobal village. The rankings of the giants change, sometimes week by week, as they compete to take over more smaller companies.

The Big Five are:

Time Warner Inc. This merger would have seemed unimaginable to its forebears: Henry Luce, the Presbyterian missionary's son who built the Time Inc.magazine empire, and Harry and Jack Warner, sons of a Jewish peasant from Polandand creators of the Warner Brothers dream factory in Hollywood. Nor does the consolidation support Luce's oft-pronounced dictum that the twentieth was "theAmerican century."

One reason Time and Warner have merged is fear of the economic power of Europe and Japan. The merged company has subsidiaries in Australia, Asia, Europe and LatinAmerica and modestly insists it is"the world's leading direct marketer of information and entertainment.'" It is the largest magazine publisher in theUnited States, with the greatest single share of all magazine revenues-flowing from Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, People and other periodicals-and aworldwide readership estimated at 120 million.

The new corporation embracesWarner mass market paperbacks, Scott Foresman, Little Brown, Time- Life Booksand the Book-of-the-Month Club, making it one of the world's largest dealers in books. It runs the world's second largest record company (WCI) and secondlargest cable TV operation, which includes American Television andCommunications Corporation, Home Box Office and Cinemax pay television, whichcollectively have 23 million subscribers. And, of course, there is Warner Brothers.

Time and Warner have a total of 35,460 employees, with few vestiges of the idiosyncratic nature and personal touch of their founders. Thousands ofshareholders now have to be satisfied, the largest being a number of banks,institutions not widely known for their interest in magazines, movies ortelevision programming that push beyond the safe perimeters of conventional wisdom and popular entertainment.

Bertelsmann AG. This German firm, founded in the mid-nineteenth century, is owned by Reinhard Mohn, who, given the magnitude of his internationaloperations, is remarkably little-known. Indeed, until the Time-Warner merger, Bertelsmann may have been the world's largest media corporation. Some time agothe company reached the limit of market share permitted in the West German print media by that country's tough Federal Cartel Office.

The firm now concentrates on making acquisitions in the rest of the world, though it recently outbid twogovernmental public systems for a new TV satellite channel that will coverGermany. Bertelsmann's specialties are book clubs and book publishing. In theUnited States it owns Doubleday, Bantam Books, Dell and the Literary Guild book club, as well as RCA and Arista records. Its subsidiary, Gruner & Jahr,publishes some forty magazines, including Parents and Young Miss in the United States. Bertelsmann's reach extends to fifteen countries on four continents.

News Corporation Ltd. This bland name denotes the domain of the global village's most compulsive empire-builder, Rupert Murdoch. His Australia-basedcompany claims more newspaper circulation than any other publisher in the world,about 14 million in that country, Great Britain and the United States.

InAustralia, Murdoch controls two-thirds of all newspaper circulation; in New Zealand he has a stake in almost a half. He owns 40 percent of the AustralianAssociated Press.

In Britain he owns the biggest Sunday newspaper in the West,News of the World (circulation 5 million); the country's largest daily, The Sun (circulation 4 million); and the papers of the English upper class, the Londondaily and Sunday Times. His papers account for a third of all newspapercirculation in the nation. He also controls William Collins books, and owns 7percent of the news service Reuters and 20 percent of Pearsons PLC (FinancialTimes, The Economist and Viking Penguin books). Murdoch's satellite channelsblanket the continent, the largest satellite television system in Europe.

InAsia, he owns the South China Morning Post. Murdoch publishes daily papers in Boston and San Antonio, controls FoxBroadcasting, the fourth largest US. television network, and the 20thCentury-Fox movie studio. He bought Harper & Row books in 1987. Just one of his magazines, TV Guide, has a circulation of 17 million. Besides that weekly, heowns Seventeen, New York and nine other periodicals, making him one of thelargest publishers of magazines in the United States. He is also the largest publisher of evangelical Christian books in this country; presumably, most ofhis fundamentalist readers are unaware that he is also the world's principal purveyor of blood-and-breasts journalism.

Hachette SA is the world's largest producer of magazines-seventy-four in ten countries, including Elle and Paris-Match. And it is the world's largest publisher of reference books, among them the Encyclopedia Americana, which thefirm acquired in 1988 when it purchased the Grolier publishing house in theUnited States.

Hachette, a French company, sells more than 30 percent of allbooks bought in that country and recently acquired Salvat of Spain, which offersthe largest distribution network for printed works in the Spanish-speakingworld. Jean-Luc Lagardere, the arms manufacturer who purchased Hachette in 1980,hopes soon to combine a major television operation with the company's Europe 1, the biggest radio network in France.

Capital Cities/ABC Inc. has less global reach than its Big Five competitors, but through its ABC television network is a force to be reckonedwith. Cap Cities, as it is known, owns eight local television and twenty-oneradio stations around the United States, including outlets in most major cities.

It also owns a chain of nine daily newspapers, including the Fort WorthStar-Telegram and the Kansas City Star and Times; Hollywood studios; Word Inc., the country's largest publisher of religious material; the ESPN cable sportschannel; 38 percent of the Arts and Entertainment cable channel; and 33 percent of the Lifetime cable channel. Through Fairchild Publications, Cap Citiespublishes Women's Wear Daily and twenty-nine other trade and specializedconsumer magazines.

While the company is not driven by a commanding personality, its largest single stockholder is Warren Buffett, whose holdings provide aglimpse of the kind of interlock that increasingly characterizes media ownership in much of the global village. With his family, Buffett controls BerkshireHathaway, through which he owns the Buffalo News; is the second largeststockholder in The Washington Post Company; and has a 6 percent interest inCoca-Cola and therefore in Columbia Pictures, which the soft-drink company owns.

Inevitably, a number of mid-size giants are pushing hard to displace one of the Big Five, or if that proves impossible, to grow big enough to expand thecharmed inner circle.

Coming on hardest may be Robert Maxwell, whose firmcontrols hundreds of publications in England alone, including the Mirror Groupnewspapers, with an estimated circulation of 10 million.

The International Thomson Organization of Canada is another contender, a conglomerate withsubsidiaries in travel and business services as well as in the media. Like Gulf + Western, International Thomson is in the process of shucking off some non-media properties to concentrate on newspaper and other publishing ventures, and isplanning a family merger with Thomson Newspapers Ltd. of Canada. Already Thomson Newspapers runs 116 dailies in the United States, more than any other chain operator.

The Gannett Company is the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, putting out USAToday and eighty-five other dailies, with a total circulation of 6.3 million. Itis the country's second largest billboard firm, owns sixteen radio and tentelevision stations, and is newly active in Hollywood through GTG (GrantTinker/Gannett) in producing television programming.

Ted Turner's TurnerBroadcasting System and General Electric, which owns the NBC television network,are also major actors on the scene.

Silvio Berlusconi dominates the Italian scene through his parent firm, Fininvest. Like Murdoch and Maxwell, Berlusconi is an ambitious operator who hasbecome a strong European presence thanks to friendship with powerfulpoliticians, particularly former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Political influence permitted him to circumvent three Italian courts, which ruled that nationwide private broadcasting was illegal. He is a major newspaper publisherin Italy (Il Giomale), a partner in a major new commercial television channel inFrance (La Cinq), has a program production company for the growing commercialchannels in Europe, owns 45 percent of Telefunf in West Germany and has stakesin Spain, Tunisia and Yugoslavia.

TV Globo, the domain of Roberto Irineu Marinho of Brazil, is a leading producer of television soap operas around the world aswell as owner of Brazil's largest newspaper, O Globo, and a television stationin Monte Carlo that broadcasts to Italy. Televisa, owned by Emilio Azcarraga,has a monopoly on Mexican commercial television, with four private channels and five radio stations.

Sony of Japan is still relatively small in global terms,but it owns CBS Records, the largest record company in the world, and is in the market for a major Hollywood studio.

One of the most durable inspirations in human folklore is the story of Davidand Goliath: Clever Little Guy knocks out Dumb Big Guy. And from time to time the Davids do still win.

Just a few weeks ago, both Hachette and MaxwellCommunications tried to capture The National Enquirer America's premier checkout-counter tabloid (circulation 4.3 million). But they were outbid byMacfadden Holdings, a relatively small magazine company that paid $ 412.5 million for the sixty-one-year-old publication.

Such victories are rare. Oncethe media giants want something, it is usually no contest. Monopolistic power dominates many other industries, and most of them enjoyspecial treatment by the government.

But media giants have two enormous advantages: They control the public image of national leaders who, as a result, fear and favor the media magnates' political agendas; and they control theinformation and entertainment that help establish the social, political andcultural attitudes of increasingly larger populations.

In the United States, Democratic and Republican Presidents alike worry as much about their treatment by NBC, ABC and CBS as they do about their treatment by their own parties. In their selection and emphasis of news and through their lobbying, the big media work for legislation favorable to all large corporationsand against small firms and public-sector institutions. Both liberal Democratic and conservative Republican Administrations have given the big mediacorporations what they want in tax breaks and special exemptions from antitrust laws.

Twenty years ago, for example, a Republican President and a Democratic Congress gave publishers the Newspaper Preservation Act, which suspended the antitrust laws for many competing newspapers. Permitted to set up previouslycompeting dailies as operating business partners, the new monopolies have raisedprices and made life more precarious for hundreds of smaller newspapers.

Even now, the nation's two largest newspaper chains, Gannett and Knight Ridder (1988 combined profits: $ 521 million), have asked that their big Detroit dailies beexempted from antitrust laws because of business hardship. In his last days asAttorney General, Edwin Meese 3d overruled an administrative law judge and hisown staff to give the companies what they wanted. Citizen groups in Detroit haveappealed to the Supreme Court.

The Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand in France has continued the privatization of public television just as readily as the conservative regimesof Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Helmut Kohl in Germany. In the Third World, global news and entertainment purveyors like the Associated Press, Reuters andU.S. television producers have swamped local news and culture. Despite thirty years of organized protest by Third World countries, the Western media presence has only grown.

True freedom of information requires three conditions: the opportunity toread and watch anything available; a diversity of sources from which to choose; and media systems that provide access for those who wish to reach their fellowcitizens.

In democratic countries the first condition is generally met. But the media titans are reducing the scope of the other two everywhere as they take over more and more once-independent companies. The new giants are open towhatever will maximize profits, but in pursuit of that goal they are just asready as any dictatorship to suppress or de-emphasize news or entertainment thatmight seriously question their power.

And far from opening their systems to journalists, authors, dramatists, musicians and citizen groups, the big corporations are working to close them off to idiosyncratic outsiders and ideas.

Theirs is a strategy of total control.

They buy every possible means of delivery (print, broadcast, films, etc.). They strive to use their own rather than independently produced material. Then they convert it to as many forms of media as they control.

A dream sequence tantalizes the lords of the global village: Giant Corporation Inc. owns subsidiaries in every medium. One of its magazines buys(or commissions) an article that can be expanded into a book, whose author iswidely interviewed in the company magazines and on its broadcast stations. Thebook is turned into a screenplay for the company movie studios, and the film is automatically booked into the company's chain of theaters. The movie has a soundtrack that is released on the company record label. The vocalist is turned into an instant celebrity by cover features in the company magazines and interviewson its television stations. The recording is played on the company's chain ofTop 40 radio stations. The movie is eventually issued by the firm'svideocassette division and shown on company television stations. After that,rerun rights to the movie are sold to other television stations around theworld.

And it all started with an article in the company magazine, whose editor selected it because it was recognized as having other uses within the company.The editor of the magazine is given a generous stock option. Every other editor and producer in the empire takes notice.

The dream dramatizes a term popular with firms that engineer mergers on WallStreet: "synergism," the creation of a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

As Lee Isgur, a media analyst for Paine Webber, puts it, "The good companiesmust be integrated." Every major Hollywood studio has recently followed thatadvice, buying television stations and chains of movie theaters to guaranteeoutlets for their motion pictures.

In 1948 the Supreme Court declared unifiedstudio-theater ownership an illegal monopoly and forced the movie studios to divest themselves of theater chains. That move rejuvenated American movies,introducing independent and foreign films.

But we now have a different SupremeCourt and a different Justice Department. Monopoly is in, antitrust is out.

Every major record company has bought as many exclusive rights as it can get to the world's record and music libraries and sheet music. After Sony bought CBSRecords last year, it purchased a company that owns exclusive rights to 35,000songs. Simon & Schuster has a division that does nothing but promote Star Trek books, which also serves the Star Trek movies issued by Gulf + Western's othersubsidiary, Paramount Pictures.

When Rupert Murdoch opened his all-European satellite television channel, the newscasts relied heavily on the content of his newspapers in London. The movies made by his 20th Century-Fox studios areregularly run on his Fox Broadcasting television network.

A growing phenomenon in the book industry since the emergence of huge ownership is the emphasis on blockbuster books -- those with potential for masssales and conversion to movies, television, cassettes and rerun licensing.

As a result, there has been a drop in the so-called midlist books, which rarelyhave great spinoff possibilities but nonetheless account for most lasting works in both fiction and nonfiction.

After Bertelsmann purchased Doubleday the Germanconglomerate pruned the U.S. book publisher's trade list by a third. The dominant companies are extraordinarily uniform in their content. The kind of trade books issued by Gulf + Western's Simon & Schuster are mostly thesame as those issued by Robert Maxwell's Macmillan.

The three Americantelevision networks daily present virtually indistinguishable information and entertainment programming, all aimed at creating a "buying mood" in an audience of millions and all using the same formulas, heavily laden with sex, violenceand fantasy commercials.

Even the world's scholarly, scientific and technical journals are nowlargely controlled by the big media barons, Maxwell and Murdoch among them.

Manyof the most prestigious scientific societies have given publishing rights tocorporations in order to save or make money.

The resulting price increases forthese unique sources of world learning have forced university and otherlibraries to reduce the number of journals they buy. (For example, the price of Early Child Development and Care went up 145 percent last year.)

The major computer data bases also are controlled by a few large firms, includingthe Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, which last year paid $ 353 million for DialogInformation Services, a data bank now available in eighty-nine nations.

Even American government data are fast disappearing into private companies, whichthen lobby to forbid the government to make that data available free orinexpensively. The firms, which pay little or nothing for the data, complain that they are victims "unfair competition with private enterprise."

Among the best-kept secrets that the giant media firms hide from their readers and viewers is the fact that they take more profit out of every consumerdollar than do smaller firms. This Law of Dominance is not the stuff of newsstories or magazine articles about the mergers, acquisitions and takeovers that have created the juggernauts.

It is, however, informative to listen to whatmerger midwives privately tell their investors. Speaking to such a group in1986, Christopher Shaw, an American merger specialist, said that a monopolynewspaper making 15 percent profit a year is a splendid takeover target because by raising rates to subscribers and advertisers the new owner can soon be makinga 40 percent annual profit.

And it is not necessary to have an old-fashioned monopoly, like the onlygrain store in a famine. Simply being much bigger than most competitors isenough.

In its 1987 annual report, Time Inc. said, "Our competitors . . . can't duplicate the reach and clout of the eight magazines we're offering ouradvertisers."

Murdoch told The Wall Street Journal that by acquiring TV Guide's large circulation he will be able to force supermarkets and newsstands to give his other magazines more prominent space-if they want TV Guide.

An advertising agency, Backer Spielvogel Bates, examined media dominance by studying 2,746 businesses over four years. The survey found, according to areport in the Financial Times last January 12, that a "market dominator (abusiness with sales volume at least 1.5 times its nearest competitor) was 52 percent more profitable than its nearest rival, and 183 percent more profitable than the market followers." Market leaders averaged a 31 percent return oninvestment, compared with 11 percent for those ranked fourth or worse.

The author of the report, Larry Light, wrote, "It is not sufficient to have superior quality."

Each nation and region of the world has its own strongly held cultural,political and religious values, and what sells in one country may be anathema in five others, as Viking Penguin, the British book publishing conglomerate,discovered when it released Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.

The countries that have officially banned the novel have a collective population approaching 1billion, many of them sharing the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fury at the author and supporting his call for Rushdie's murder.

An official of the publishing house said that because of the troubles, and despite large sales insome countries, "we can never, ever, sell enough copies to make money on thisbook."

Thus the global reach of the largest media firms, and their grand strategyof synergism, increases what already is a drug on the market: commercially safe, generic, all-purpose books, films and TV programs.

And the bigger the corporation, the fewer risks it is likely to take. When The Satanic Verses was threatened, the biggest chain bookstores initially took the book off their shelves. Small bookstores kept the novel in stock; but then, risk-taking is the specialty of smaller firms.

Like the nuclear superpowers, the media Goliaths don't want to fight to the death, and surprisingly often they find it convenient to cooperate -- always to thedisadvantage of the Davids.

Even archrivals like Murdoch and Maxwell cut deals with one another: On May 16 the two announced a five-year, multimillion-dollaragreement linking Murdoch's Sky Television PLC satellite operation with Maxwell Cable Television.

Time Warner is a partner with Hachette and Mondadori in theFrench and Italian editions of Fortune. Berlusconi of Italy has a production project with Lorimar Telepictures, a subsidiary of Time Warner, and a similararrangement for making television programs with Leo Kirch of Germany and Maxwellof Britain. Simon & Schuster buys Hachette's Regents Publishing, and Hachettebuys an interest in the big Italian publishing firm Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera.

Many of the media magnates also indulge in another form of synergism:i nterlocks with financial and commercial operations that are affected by news, opinion and popular culture, and which can be either promoted or protected by the parent firm's media.

While Capital Cities/ABC, for example, controls theESPN cable channel, RJR Nabisco, the global food and tobacco company (and animportant advertiser with ABC), has a 20 percent interest in ESPN.

General Electric, a second-level giant in the media through its ownership of NBC, is a first-rank giant in world military and nuclear reactor production. And Hachette's chair, Jean-Luc Lagardere, is also chair of one of France's largest military defense contractors.

Earlier this year, soft-drink maker Pepsico paid more than $ 5 million for two minutes of TV time worldwide to air a commercial showing the rock starMadonna dancing through a church in her underwear.

It was the largest purchaseof television time in history, putting the Pepsi pitch in some forty countries and to an audience estimated at 250 million people. The commercial was adaptedfrom the popular singer's latest music video, "Like a Prayer," and must have seemed to its creators a promotion that young people everywhere would find irresistible.

The Catholic Church, however, did not, not least because in the video(though not in the commercial) Madonna gives herself stigmata and jitterbugs in front of a row of burning crosses.

Since Pepsico wants the church's communicants to drink a great deal of its product, the commercial was shelved in the UnitedStates, at least for the time being.

But Pepsico's second thoughts on that particular advertisement in no way alter the significance of the new media network multinational selling.

For the lords of the global village are part of a powerful troika: themselves, the new worldwide advertising agencies and the multinational manufacturers of consumer goods.

And this troika is already changing the cultural, social and political values in much of the world. Affluence is growing in the developed world, and even the Third World, for all its grinding poverty, is an increasingly profitable market for imported goods.

More than $ 200 billion a year is spent worldwide on advertising, and the leading multinational manufacturers of common commodities such as detergents,cosmetics, soft drinks and cigarettes want ever more channels to get their messages out.

The great networks of advertising-supported media -- newspapers,magazines, radio and television -- are the outlets the multinational merchants and their ad agencies are looking for: There are more than 600 million television sets worldwide, with hundreds of millions yet to come.

Even though one station can carry up to 720 commercials a day, most national broadcast systems outside the United States are noncommercial, on whichadvertising is limited. But the political power of the manufacturing-advertising media triumvirate is such that, with the aid of current trends toward deregulation and policies of uninhibited free-market economics,the broadcasting systems of Europe and elsewhere are being transformed.

Noncommercial radio and television systems are being weakened or displaced bythe global media companies, which are creating new commercial stations, cablesystems and satellite channels.

Europe has far fewer commercial television stations than the United States. Their number is expected to triple in the EC in the coming years, but even then each station will have limited geographical reach.

Consequently, there are plans for increased deployment of commercial satellites 22,000 miles in space, in geosynchronous orbit. Such hardware is capable of beaming down information,entertainment and commercials to large portions of the earth's surface,transmitting directly to homes and transcending national boundaries, national laws and national cultures.

One satellite alone can cover a third of theplanet's surface, though most commercial ones focus on less than that. By 1990 there will be more than forty new satellite channels broadcasting over WesternEurope, to home receiving dishes and to local cable systems.

Satellite broadcasting is not for small entrepreneurs. It costs about $ 300 million to place a satellite in orbit, and about $ 200,000 a month to rent oneof its channels.

Rupert Murdoch has rented five channels on Astra, the most recent European launch. Astra offers a total of sixteen channels, each of which is capable of transmitting a video picture with four simultaneous audiochannels to match, which could be used for four different languages.

By 1990 the new commercial channels will need 500,000 hours of television programming a year, a major motivation in the global binge to buy, among otherthings, production studios, recording companies and movie, video and recordlibraries.

The major media firms that already control programs are staking outclaims all over the world, including in formerly closed Communist societies. Ted Turner's Cable News Network, for example, has been negotiating with the SovietUnion to use some of its satellites to send his network to India and Pakistan,as well as to Egypt and other North African nations. And American firms already have rented time on Chinese satellites.

The shift in Europe to commercial channels has special appeal to conservative regimes because it is of a piece with the right-wing campaign tosell public-service functions to private entrepreneurs.

Moreover, it accommodates the desires for increased broadcast advertising by multinational industrial and financial institutions, which are natural political allies of the conservatives.

In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is creating newsatellite commercial channels while trying to weaken the finances and audiencereach of the state-run British Broadcasting Corporation, perhaps the best radio and television operation in the world.

Her government's white paper on the future of British broadcasting calls for an end to fixed support for the BBCfrom license fees on receiving sets. Instead, the paper calls for substitutionof pay channels and the loss of one all-night channel to a private contractor.

In Germany last year, the conservative government of Helmut Kohl placed a public broadcast sports agreement out for bid (won by Bertelsmann). Kohl's government also licensed two new commercial channels to be distributed by cable, and hasthe government postal service laying the cable.

Portugal's first commercial channel will be owned by the Catholic Church. In the United States, Ronald Reagan's Federal Communications Commission deregulated most of the airwaves and reduced support for public broadcasting, policies also pursued by theconservative government of Canada.

One of the most profitable commodities in the modern world is human attention. Whoever can harvest it in wholesale quantities can make money in kind. I

n the United States, one Nielsen rating point reflects 1 percent of thecountry's 90 million television households. One percentage point for a network in prime-time audience share represents more than $ 30 million in added revenues each year.

Nothing in human experience has prepared men, women and children for the modern television techniques of fixing human attention and creating the uncritical mood required to sell goods, many of which are marginal at best tohuman needs.

The first demand of competitive commercial broadcasting is to freeze the hand that reaches for the channel switch. After years of experimenting with various prime-time programs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, commercial broadcasters found the basic way to maintain second-by-second attention:constant violence, gratuitous sex and deliberate manipulation of split-secondchange of images and sounds to make an emotional and sensory impact that leaves no time for reflection.

American commercial broadcasting has produced much that is important in public affairs, programs with genuine humanistic values; it has also given us entertainment that is harmless and occasionally even uplifting.

But most programming conforms to the imperative to freeze the hand that reaches for the switch.

Commercial television has also degraded the electoral process in the United States. National political campaigns are now waged mainly through ten-, twenty-, and thirtysecond commercials; and since television's political dominance began in 1960, a smaller percentage of eligible citizens has bothered to vote in each subsequent election.

Another dubious American gift to the world is that enduring national scandal, children's programming on commercial television.

Despite the harm done by this mindless menu of violent cartoons and blatant commercialism -- harm that has been confirmed by the Surgeon General's office and others -- decades of parents' and educators' complaints have been ignored.

Multinational manufacturers and multinational advertising agencies now have enlarged power to suppress public messages they do not like.

A year ago, Saatchi& Saatchi (the world's biggest advertising conglomerate, remember) acquired the Campbell-Mithun agency in the United States. The small agency was servicing antismoking ads for the Minnesota Department of Health, but Brown & WilliamsonTobacco Company was spending $ 35 million then with Saatchi to advertise Kool cigarettes.

The Minnesota account was only 3 percent of that, so Saatchi dropped the health department. The parent firm had learned its lesson three months earlier when one of the biggest advertisers in the world, RJR Nabisco, droppedanother Saatchi subsidiary because it had created a Northwest Airlinestelevision commercial showing passengers applauding the airline's No Smokingpolicy.

RJR Nabisco, besides marketing food products, makes Camel, Winston and Salem cigarettes. The linkage between smoking and deaths that now total more than 350,000 a year has been known for more than sixty years.

But warnings by medical authorities have been blunted by tobacco ads carried in the media that associate cigarettes with youthfulness, good health, fashionableness, feminine grace and manly vigor.

For years, even news stories gave as much weight to the claims of the tobacco industry as they did to the scientific findings of medical authorities. Television did not drop tobacco advertising until forced to by law in 1971. Newspapers and magazines quietly cheered their inheritance of all those advertising dollars.

With growing education in the United States and Europe, per capita smoking is beginning to decrease. Consequently, tobacco companies are pressing their commercials in Asia and the Third World, where in recent years per capita smoking has risen 76 percent.

The goal of surrounding every human being with sales promotion every waking moment has now reached even books. Whittle Communications, half owned by TimeWarner, plans soon to issue commissioned volumes from major authors like David Halberstam and John Kenneth Galbraith that will carry color ads for Federal Express and be given away to a "select" readership.

For a price, Hollywoodstudios now place brand-name products with the labels showing in motion picture scenes. For example, Reese's Pieces candy was displayed, by contract, in the fantasy film E.T.

This tide has reached the Soviet Union, which is selling advertising patches on its cosmonauts' space suits and the sides of spacestations.

Even the schools are no longer immune. Earlier this year, WhittleCommunications began a national campaign to give cooperating districts $ 50,000 worth of television equipment in return for permission to beam into classrooms a daily twelve-minute "news" program complete with two minutes of commercials for blue jeans, candy bars and other youth products.

Even without these classroom sales pitches, by age 16 the average American already has been exposed to more than 300,000 commercials.

The U.N. draft Declaration on Freedom of Information states that "all governments should pursue policies under which the free flow of information within countries and across frontiers will be protected. The right to seek and transmit information should be assured in order to enable the public to ascertain facts and appraise events."

In 1960, when the declaration was introduced, it had the support of those who had in mind the controlled information of authoritarian governments. It was assumed that once governments got out of the way, "the free flow of information" and power of the public "to ascertain and appraise events" would be made possible by free-enterprise media.

They were correct. The problem today is not free enterprise but the lack of it.

No small group of organizations is wise enough or unselfish enough to provide most of the news, information, scholarship, literature and entertainment for a whole society, let alone most of the world. That can come only from a large number of organizations in a field not dominated by a few, with a variety of newcomers free to enter and compete whenever and wherever existing media fail to reflect the realities and the aspirations of people's lives.

It is time for the nations of the world to meet again and make a newDeclaration of Freedom of Information, this time establishing antitrust principles that will apply at home as well as across national borders. An international convention aimed at insuring a diversity of choice in the media could set limits on how many media outlets one person or one megacorporation could control, just as other international conventions have created rules for marine and air navigation, broadcast frequencies or the dumping of consumer products, where unrestrained activity by a few often damages many.

The answer is not some international standard of censorship. It is no gain for freedom to replace national censorship with international censorship. The answer must be directed solely at the size of corporations, not the content of what they issue;at the restraint of economic activity that reduces voices, not at what the voices say.

Belatedly, the nations of the world are recognizing that they and their corporations must be restrained from polluting the earth and its atmosphere with chemicals. The basis for all liberty -- freedom of information -- is also in danger of being polluted, not by chemicals but by a new mutation of that familiar scourge of the free spirit, centrally controlled information.

Rupert Murdoch may or may not be the most voracious media baron of them all, but he probably is the only one who ever prompted his critics to convene an entire conference devoted to dissecting him.

This gathering of journalists and sundry others took place earlier this year in Sydney, Australia, where for three days various damning papers were presented, and the mood can best be summed up by theobservation that Murdoch has become "the Magellan of the Information Age,splashing ashore on one continent after another."

Murdoch started his media voyage Down Under in 1954, after his father died and left him The News in Adelaide. He was content to toil there until 1960,when, at age 29, he began his empire-building by taking over the Norton newspapers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

In those days Murdoch was a vocal socialist, supported the Labor Party and professed high journalistic ideals: "Unless we can return to the principles of public service:' he said about that we will lose our claim to be the Fourth Estate. What right have we to speak inthe public interest when, too often, we are motivated by personal gain?"

In 1964, Murdoch appeared to be acting on those sentiments when he founded the continent's first national newspaper, a quality daily named The Australian. The country's journalists rejoiced, but not for long.

For soon Murdoch was bending the paper to his increasingly conservative views. Betty Ridden, a poet and one of Australia's leading journalists, recalls that in the beginningMurdoch was always in the newsroom, could always be talked to and argued with"Now it's all gone bad," she says. "Why? Power, not money."

Murdoch soon had plenty of both.

In 1969 he splashed ashore in England andoutbid Robert Maxwell for News of the World, befriending its chair, Sir William Carr, and then forcing him out soon after the deal was done, a standard Murdoch tactic. Stafford Somerfield, the paper's editor, was next. "I did not come all this way," Magellan said, "not to interfere."

Nor to settle for merely one newspaper.

He bought the ailing Sun in 1969,and by 1977 it was the biggest selling daily in the English-speaking world(circulation now 4 million). Murdoch lured readers into his tent by perfecting the prurient journalism that by now has become the standard at almost all hispublications, a mix of lurid crime tales under souped-up headlines and pinups with their bare breasts pushing out of page three.

Even the august Times and Sunday Times of London were not immune. After Murdoch acquired them in 1981 and they were too slow to introduce the titillation formula, a memorandum appeared demanding more sex. The next day The Times carried the headline, "How I Sold Myself to a Sex Club."

Murdoch unabashedly used his British papers to help Margaret Thatcher intopower. The late Charles Douglas Home, while editor of The Times under Murdoch, told the press lord's biographer, Thomas Kiernan: "Rupert and Mrs. Thatcher consult regularly on every important matter of policy. . . . Around here he's often jokingly referred to as Mr. Prime Minister."

Murdoch wielded the same conservative clout in the United States, putting the editorial page and news columns of his sex-and-crime-crazed New York Post (sold in 1988)in the slavish service of the Reagan Administration.

One payoff was that Reagan's Federal Communications Commission permitted him to do what it had never allowed any other broadcaster in the country to do: acquire a new television station in a city where he also owned a daily newspaper, and keep both.

That paved the way for Fox Broadcasting, Murdoch's chain of television stations in the United States. Not surprisingly, this so-called fourth network offers a steady diet of sex, violence and peeping-Tom programming.

Murdoch is a master at weaving his way through the complex laws that permit multinational corporations to escape taxes. He and his family own less than 50 percent of News Corporation Ltd., the Australian firm that is his base. The rest of the stock is safely in the hands of docile shareholders. Murdoch makes sure not to own 50 percent or more probably because, under U.S. tax regulations, that would increase his income taxes in this country.

Forbes has calculated that in1985, News Corporation profits were $101 million but were set at only $30million in the United States because of US. tax accounting loopholes.

Murdoch has built up a debt in the hundreds of millions in acquiring his empire. But this enormous obligation has its tax advantages, too, providing large deductions for interest paid to help offset the extraordinary profit levels and cash flows typical of the mass media.

Murdoch's acquisition technique is shrewd if informal. David Davis Jr, a publisher involved in one takeover, said it all happened so fast "I didn't know whether I'd made a deal or not. . . . They do everything on the phone or inhallways."

A London Times staff member is less bewildered: "One minute he's swimming along with a smile, then snap! There's blood in the water Your head's gone."

Reinhard Mohn presides over Bertelsmann AG, one of the largest media corporations in the world.

He began this burgeoning empire in 1946 after returning to Gutersloh, his bombed-out hometown in northern Germany, with all his belongings in a potato sack. He had just spent more than two years as a prisoner of war in Concordia, Kansas, having been captured while an officer in Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps. The family business, which had been publishing Protestant hymnals and religious pamphlets since 1835, was an empty shell.

Mohn, a great-grandson ofthe founder, rooted about in the postwar ruins, pulling old books from the rubble of libraries and stores, bartering anything he could for waste paper that would hold print.

Inspired by the example of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which he had learned about while a prisoner, he launched similar clubs on a smaller scalei n Germany. His clubs now have 22 million members in twenty-two nations, making Bertelsmann the world's largest purveyor of such mail-order literature.

Over the years his leadership grew to combine the openness and dynamism ofAmerican society that had impressed him in Kansas with what was known in the German Army as Auftragstaktik: assigning a mission to a commander and giving him the freedom to decide how to make it succeed.

He made this kind of decentralized management the rule at Bertelsmann, and clearly the formula works: Last year thecompany had 42,000 employees in twenty-five countries, revenues of more than $6.5 billion and net profits of $230 million.

But for all the delegating, Mohn was the linchpin of the operation. "He is the sort of man from whom you could buy a used car with confidence but who will probably persuade you to buy two new ones instead," one veteran Mohn observer has remarked.

Inevitably, Mohn has made a few mistakes along the way. In 1979, Bertelsmann launched an American version of the high-quality German geographic magazine GEO.But the publication failed to catch on, and after two years it folded with losses of some $ 50 million.

Nor does Bertelsmann always get its way in acquisitions abroad. In 1984 the company tried to buy U.S. News & World Report but was outbid by real estate entrepreneur Mortimer Zuckerman. And last year theBritish Office of Fair Trading blocked the conglomerate's efforts to purchase and then merge Britain's largest book club.

But these momentary setbacks pale in comparison with the firm's biggest embarrassment: In 1984 its popular West German magazine Stern, with much fanfare, published "Hitler's diaries" -- only to discover they were a hoax.

Unlike many of his rivals, Mohn has not operated mainly with borrowed money.One reason is that his early plans were so ambitious they spooked most banks. To raise needed capital he created a nonvoting, profit-sharing stock plan that gives employees and some outsiders a stake in the company and provides the corporation with more than $ 200 million a year in investment income. The certificates pay annual dividends of 15 percent and in addition provide a substantial payout when an employee retires.

Mohn himself retired in 1981, following his own company rule that sets 60 as the age for stepping down. Though he has three sons, Mohn wanted none of the family power struggles that have broken or weakened other media empires, such as at Axel Springer Verlag, where a current fragmentation is causing much bitterness.

None of Mohn's sons is an heir to the corporation. After his death, operating control will go to a Bertelsmann charitable foundation.

Mohn remains Bertelsmann's chair, but the chief operating officer is his hand-picked successor, Mark Woessner, 50 years old. In 1986 alone, under Woessner's aggressive leadership, Bertelsmann paid $ 475 million for the mammoth U.S. publishing firm Doubleday and $ 330 million for RCA Records.

"Full integration of our U.S. units is moving faster than we thought," Woessner said last year "Where do we go from here? We don't know exactly. I'd like to enlarge what I call our three pillars: Germany, Europe and America."

The company alsohas ambitious plans to erect a fourth pillar in Asia.

Reinhard Mohn, the man who saved the firm and built the global pillars, leads a quiet life, though he is still chief of the company's supervisory board. He goes regularly to headquarters at 270 Carl Bertelsmann Strasse, a street named after his great-grandfather.The family owns 89 percent of the company's stock, which makes Mohn one of the world's richest men.

But unlike his high-flying fellow media giants, the 69-year-old patriarch lives a spartan life, more in the style of a provincial businessman than a global billionaire,lunching occasionally in the employee cafeteria.

Modesty has not prevented pride of place, though -- a pride that, typically, is useful for the firm. Gutersloh has a population of 80,000, there is no jet airport within a hundred miles and the express trains don't stop there; but Mohn has built an elegant hotel with what is reputed to be the finest kitchen in Westphalia.

On the eve of the war, Ludvik Hoch fled his native Czechoslovakia and arrived penniless in England, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. He joined the British Army, changed his name to Ian Robert Maxwell, married Elisabeth Meynard,and has told interviewers that he promised his bride: "I shall win a MilitaryCross. I shall re-create a family. I shall make my fortune. I shall be PrimeMinister of England."

The 65-year-old Maxwell has yet to move into 10 Downing Street, but he rose to the rank of captain in the army; Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery pinned the Military Cross on him for charging a German machine-gun nest; and he has made millions of pounds and a new family.

Five years ago, he also predicted that "in ten years' time there will be only ten global corporations of communications. . . . I would expect to be one of them."

His acquisition last year of the US. book publishing house Macmillan for $2.62 billion put him in the running.

Maxwell started his empire with money borrowed from relatives, moving in on a field he now dominates: publishing and republishing scientific, scholarly and technical journals from all over the world through his subsidiary, Pergamon Press.

His newspaper flagship in Britain is the Daily Mirror, whose circulation of 3.5 million is second only to his archrival Rupert Murdoch's Sun (4 million) and which shares The Sun's enthusiasm for bottomless taste and topless women.

Also like Murdoch, Maxwell keeps tight personal control of company finances and makes corporate decisions quickly, free of the committee members, adviser-creditors and shareholders who must approve acquisitions in most other conglomerates. To an extraordinary degree for a global firm, his finances are a byzantine mixture of publicly traded securities and private funds that aredifficult for outsiders to trace.

Unlike Murdoch and most other media moguls, Maxwell pursues moderately left politics. He regards himself as a socialist and has long been associated with the British Labor Party, which his papers support and which he represented in Parliament for a term in the 1960s. He is doubtless the only socialist in England with a private rooftop heliport.

Maxwell relishes the limelight and often travels the globe in his private jet with his own photographer to record his achievements, which he tends to announce with a flamboyance matched only by sartorial combinations such as lavender shirts and purple velvet bow ties.

He contributes editorials to theDaily Mirror under the byline Charles Wilberforce, an atypical gesture of modesty. Nevertheless, when a reader wins one of the paper's ubiquitous lottery games, his or her picture runs against a background photograph of Maxwell.

When faced with bad publicity, Maxwell can forget about freedom of the press. Last year he mounted a series of lawsuits to try to stop publication of two critical biographies, preferring instead an authorized one by Joe Haines, political editor of the biographee's Mirror Group newspapers. The actions against the two unanointed authors, their publishers and printers failed, and Maxwell had to pay all court costs.

Undeterred, he next instructed his solicitors to write British booksellers threatening further legal pursuit if they sold the two allegedly libelous biographies. Many stores caved in to this threat.

The Maxwell quest to be a major player in the international media sweepstakes has not always been. smooth. Twenty years ago a financial scandal cost him control of Pergamon, then publicly traded, and also lost him his seat in Parliament. British securities authorities accused him of grossly inflating the company's prospects and said he "cannot be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company."

Maxwell soon was nicknamed "the bouncing Czech," and Queen Elizabeth, apparently not an enthusiast, reportedly began calling her household spaniel "Maxwell."

But Maxwell the man bounced back and regained Pergamon as a privately held firm. He did it with the help of a family-controlled foundation in the tax haven of Liechtenstein. The precise nature of the Maxwell Foundation and its relationship to the rest of his empire has puzzled financial analysts.

Maxwell recently transferred part of the foundation to Britain because Liechtenstein, not a member of the European Community, would be ineligible for any strictly EC enterprises Maxwell may explore as 1992 nears.

Jean-Luc Lagardere may look like a perfect model of the debonair Parisian, but his hero is John Wayne.

Perhaps admiration of a mythic gunslinger is appropriate for a man who, at age37, became head, and is still the chair, of one of the largest defensecontractors in France, Matra SA. Besides manufacturing guided missiles and other tools of war, Matra builds subways and telephone systems and has joint ventures with Fiat of Italy, DaimlerBenz of West Germany and Wallenberg of Sweden.

But Lagardere wears more than one ten-gallon hat. He is also chair of a global media firm. At the age of 52, he won control of Hachette SA, an old publishing firm then in serious financial trouble.

He displaced the great-great-grandson of the founder, Professor Louis Hachette, who in 1826 won the first newspaper concessions on the French railroad. The enterprising professor later started a small press in Paris (one of his editors was a youngman named Emile Zola) and went on to become a major publisher and distributor.

In 1980, when Hachette was in trouble and its banks were searching for a savior, Lagardere managed the takeover partly with the support of his fellow conservative, Prime Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing. The interlock of a major defense firm with an important news and publishing company aroused objections -- a Socialist first secretary called Lagardere (a marchand de canon: munitions merchant).

Lagardere promised to keep Hachette out of politics and most critics believe that he has, although when he speaks publicly in support of Frenchconservatives, as he did for Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, his is not the voiceof an average voter.

In the past decade Lagardere has built Hachette into France's largest communications company and one of the world's biggest.

In France alone its operations encompass a range that includes the country's largest publisher of encyclopedias, the popular weekly ParisMatch and Europe 1, France's number two radio broadcaster and the base for his ambitions to play a major role in continental television.

In 1987, when the French invited private bids for the government-owned television network, TF-1, Lagardere lost out to a consortiumthat included Britain's Robert Maxwell.

But he remains determined to continue Hachette's growth into all the media.

He has said that he saw the potential for diversification "well before other industrial groups started doing the same thing."

Like other foreign media giants, Lagardere has been shopping in the UnitedStates, starting slowly but expanding rapidly. Hachette, with its affiliatedfirm, Publications Filipachi, first entered the American magazine field in 1985 by launching the U.S. version of his slick French fashion magazine Elle. (Lagardere did this in a joint venture with Rupert Murdoch, a partnership that also launched the new American magazine Premiere. Lagardere has since bought Murdoch's half share in Elle and sold his stake in Premiere to Murdoch.)

A year later Lagardere bought Curtis Circulation Company, the second largest magazinedistributor in the United States. In 1988, Hachette became a major force in US. publishing. He paid $716 million to Diamandis Communications Inc. for twelve magazines (among them Woman's Day) and became the largest magazine publisher in the world.

The same month he paid $450 million for Grolier Publications, which included such "American" titles as Encyclopedia Americana, Disney's Wonderful World of Reading and Dr Seuss's Beginning Readers Program.

Lagardere told the Financial Times last year that he is profoundly committedto Europe, but believes "it is crucial to establish a bridge between Europe and North America."

Yet his interest in that bridge has not prevented him from starting one to Asia as well. Matra sells ground-to-air missiles to China andl ast year Hachette launched a Chinese edition of Elle.

Lagardere began his career as a research engineer with the big French firm Dassault, but it wasn't long before he was directing Matra, then a company with about 1,000 workers. Twenty-five years later the diversified firm employs17,000 people and runs with such efficiency that Lagardere is regarded as the best manager in France.

"If enterprises are allowed to age, they are doomed," hesays. "That was the problem with the 150-year-old house of Hachette when we took it over."

When Lagardere took charge of the publishing company nine years ago,he replaced almost the entire management team, giving further substance to his already widespread reputation as an enfant terrible in the French business community.

Terrible or not, French President Francois Mitterrand made Lagardere an officer of the Legion of Honor in 1985. Not long ago the honoree went into investment banking with his son and heir apparent, Arnaud. Together they have been busily engineering mergers,acquisitions and leveraged buyouts.

"I see myself as a bit like the trapeze act at the circus," says the perpetually suntanned elder Lagardere. "But I always have a safety net."

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