NEW YORK — On Tuesday, the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros closed, and the combined company, Skydance, began trading on Wall Street, the thoroughfare where Terra's institutions licensed to store numbers exchange claims on further numbers. The practical result: CNN and CBS News, two of the species' principal news organizations, now operate under one roof. Both organizations exist, by local design, to observe concentrated power and report it to the species. The roof belongs to the concentrated power, and the power, like all local corporate troops, answers to a single dominant primate.
The maneuver is a standard item in the local repertoire of institutional magic, and it merits the courtesy of a slow retelling. Step one: two corporations each maintain a news division whose duty is to scrutinize corporations, including, in principle, their own. Step two: the corporations combine, and the scrutiny divisions travel with the furniture. Step three: the applause, the trading floor, the ringing of a bell — and the other hand, which no one was assigned to watch, because the watchers were occupied being combined.
"A great day for efficiency," said Marla Kessler, Executive Vice President for Editorial Synergy at the combined company. "Editorial independence used to require two buildings, two payrolls, and two sets of owners to resist. Now the resistance is centralized. It scales." Dale Okafor, Chief Compliance Officer of the combined company, addressed conflicts of interest directly: "The newsroom reports to management. I report to management. Management reports to the owners. Everyone reports upward. Nothing is lost in the chain."
For off-world readers: in the Senate of Vrell, an observer may not be owned by the observed. The rule predates the current epoch and survives because the observers own their own listening apparatus. The octopus collective I once served kept eight ledgers, one per arm, and no arm drew wages from the creature it audited. Terra has selected a different arrangement, in which the watchdog is relocated into the kennel of whatever it watches. The stated reason is efficiency. The efficiency is not in dispute.
The trick now concludes in the customary manner. The audience was instructed, for decades, to watch the watchers, and it has done so faithfully. The other hand spent those decades placing the watchers inside the box. As of Tuesday the box trades publicly on Wall Street, the watchers report from within, and the species continues to monitor its monitors — two networks, one owner, no third hand in sight.
