TRNN: Verizon Buys AOL, Now Owns HuffPost. What Does This Mean to Us? --(Interview with Free Press)

[KoKo]

Verizon Buys AOL, Now Owns HuffPost
Uploaded on May 12, 2015

Free Press's Craig Aaron discusses Verizon's $4 billion purchase of AOL

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS for those with SLOW INTERNET. FULL TRANSCRIPT AT:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13848

Craig Aaron is the president and CEO of Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund in April 2011. He joined Free Press in 2004 and speaks across the country on media, Internet and journalism issues. Craig is a frequent guest on talk radio and is quoted often in the national press. His commentaries also appear regularly in the Guardian and the Huffington Post. Before joining Free Press, he was an investigative reporter for Public Citizen's Congress Watch and the managing editor of In These Times magazine. He is the editor of two books, Appeal to Reason: 25 Years of In These Times and Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age. He is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

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SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN:

This is The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.Verizon, the telecom giant, announced Tuesday it will be buying AOL for $50 per share, which amounts to about $4.4 billion. This will give Verizon, known to us as our cable company, access to AOL content. For example, the Huffington Post is owned by them, and digital advertising. The acquisition gives Verizon an entryway into the increasingly competitive online video space. Verizon is the country's largest wireless carrier, as well as an internet and TV provider. Joining me now to discuss this is Craig Aaron. Craig is coming to us from Washington, D.C., and he's the president and CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action Fund.Thank you so much for joining us today.

CRAIG AARON, CEO AND PRESIDENT AT FREE PRESS:

Thanks for having me

PERIES:

So Craig, explain to us, what does this mean to us?

AARON:

Well you know, this is yet another in a long series of mega-media mergers. I think what disappoints me about this deal is that, you know, Wall Street has really pressured and forced companies like Verizon to just try to get bigger and bigger and swallow up more companies and more of the competition, instead of actually incentivizing, encouraging them to invest in their networks.You know, for the amount of money, for the $4 billion that Verizon is spending to buy AOL, they could actually extend high speed broadband service to many, many communities across the country. Communities like Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, where you can't get their fastest internet service. Instead, we're seeing them buy advertising technology content, and we're seeing more concentration. Wall Street loves it, but it's not really that good for us as consumers, or certainly as a larger society.

PERIES:

So Craig, this kind of consolidation organizations like yourselves have been fighting for years and years and years. Give us sort of fundamentals as to why you've been fighting it, and what does this leave us with in society?AARON: Well you know, I think that you're always concerned about too much power over information being held in too few hands. And definitely the public benefits with as many competing sources of information as possible to tell them what's happening in their community, what happens in the country at large. And what we've seen happen over the last 30 years is going from maybe 50 companies that control most of what we watch, see, hear, and read every day, down to just a handful. And Verizon with this move is definitely trying to stay in that handful, but you've got the same company already controlling your access to the internet, controlling your cell phone, now getting their hand in the content business.And I think there's a lot of reasons for people to be concerned about that. Verizon is a company that doesn't have a very good reputation when it comes to trying to do journalism and have that freely cover their own activities. And I think they're a company that doesn't have a very good reputation when it comes to privacy. We know about the spying and surveillance of your phone records. Certainly Verizon has been complicit in that, although their hand has obviously been forced as well. But here's a company looking to make, to know even more about you. Tie all the things they know because they're your phone provider, because they're your cable company, to the kind of advertising they can offer over content networks.So I think there's a lot of unanswered questions about that that also speak to these larger concerns about media consolidation. As a citizen, as just a participant in this democracy, you benefit from independent sources of information competing for scoops, competing for news, not having it all under one roof. And I think a company like Verizon, we have to have questions. What happens to a previously independent source like the Huffington Post, like the tech blog Engadget that maybe took a critical view of Verizon's activities. What happens when Verizon is the company that's writing the cheques?

More Transcript At:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13848

[delrem]

1. It means more clickbait!

Consolidated clickbait, inc.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. AOL CEO is supposed make 200 million as result of sale.

As in PERSONALLY make.

And I expect Verizon will be able to grab any pension money.

It is scary to realize Verizon is making a cash purchase. They had that much money lying around.

[swilton]

3. Really like the TRNN/

Sharmini Peries style of interview, the probing and follow-up questions - she's in control....

Informative interview. The larger picture seems to be one of an increasingly dysfunctional society where businesses have lost their raison d'etres. The new businesses have lost their connections to the goals and services they were originally created for. Because growing larger is their new raison d'etre, they have become useless as far as providing any real services or doing any meaningful work.