The typical media report about media conglomeration is supercharged with the rhetoric of the conglomerates themselves. Fusing a business story with a celebrity story, it stresses the glamour of deal-making and the size, complexity and hypothetical synergy of the composite firm. Murdoch/ Disney/Time Warner/TCI is said to be sprawling through hardware and software, space and cable, wires and wireless, news and entertainment to bestride the earth. Stock analysts opine that the latest move of the week is somebody's coup. The burning question of the hour is, What's on the mind, the walls, the menu and the feet of Gerald Levin/Ted Turner/Rupert Murdoch/Michael Eisner/John Malone/ Sumner Redstone/Barry Diller as this colossus contemplates the deal of deals? The journalism of the awe-filled room is usually too busy to ask what these immense mergers and acquisitions mean for Americanthat is, worldculture. That's not the beat of the breathless chronicler. Nor are the prognosticators called to account for their previous financial projections, the ones that misfired.

Meanwhile, critics of the conglomeration juggernaut stress the danger of censorship. In television, there are a few reported cases, enough to worry about, though the argument as usually presented is not rigorous enough. NBC in particular seems to have gone lightly reporting allegations against the parent company, General Electric. According to the television reporter Marc Gunther in American Journalism Review (October 1995), a 1989 "Today" segment on defective bolts failed to cite GE, which used said bolts for nuclear reactors; "Today" mentioned GE only in a damage-controlling follow-up. A 1990 "Today" segment on consumer boycotts, Gunther adds, omitted any mention of a campaign against GE itself, and one guest has said that a producer cautioned him not to bring up the GE case. (NBC said this was the producer's say-so.) But Gunther goes on to note that since 1990, NBC has covered GE scandals unobjectionably. It will come as no surprise if other such cases turn up nevertheless. Self-censorship, in any case, is probably the worse danger, but it is rarely expressedit leaves no smoking memos.

Conglomerates would seem to be set-ups for conflicts of interest between news and entertainment. Time, after all, as Gunther points out, devoted a cover story to Scott Turow, a Warner Books author, timed to the Warner Bros. release of the movie "Presumed Innocent." Time found Turow more newsworthy than Newsweek did. TV Guide and the New York Post, both controlled by Murdoch's News Corp., have recently come under attack for showing favoritism toward programs on Fox, also owned by Murdoch. TV Guide, for instance, was criticized for a December 1995 cover featuring the low-rated Fox show "Party of Five""The Best Show You're Not Watching." On the other hand, Time's coverage of the Bob Dole/William Bennett attack on gangsta rap did not fawn on the parent company and was no moreor lesssuperficial than Newsweek's. Movies and celebrities are the stuff of cover stories whoever the owner is. In any event, to investigate the impact of mergers, it won't do simply to ask, say, Joel Siegel of "Good Morning America" whether he plans to go light on Disney releases. What would you expect a self-respecting reviewer to say? Would any reviewer survive in any major publishing outlet today who did not gush about a hefty share of Hollywood releases?

More worrying by far than petty backscratching (or backstabbing) is the long-term chillthe sum, over months and years, of 1,000 microdecisions made by 1,000 personnel about 1,000 stories that it seems, well, injudicious to push too far. Worrying is the closure of news that comes from closure of bureaus and miscellaneous cost cutting. (The networks have precious few researchers as it is.) It stands to reason that reporters will also hesitate to take the risk of stepping on exposed toes. The larger and farther flung the enterprise, the more toes, and therefore the greater the risk for reporters. What was Cap Cities/ABC's Thomas Murphy signaling when he chided "Good Morning America's" Charlie Gibson for doubting how glorious it would be to work for the Disney "family"?

Already, in fact, the networks and papers alike have shown precious little interest in the momentous telecommunications legislation that Congress just passed in a snap and the president signed. The fragment of the bill that concerned the V-chip received more news attention than the rest of the bill put togetherthe increase of license periods to eight years, for example, and the easing of ownership restrictions. Now, single-ownership papers may or may not have been more likely to cover these questions than the chains havethis is pretty serious, complicated stuff for today's American newspapers. But aren't these questions worth contemplating at a leisurely pace before irreversible mergers are blithely waved through by a government afflicted by deregulation mania?

The case against the ill effects of conglomeration is strongest and best researched in the case of newspapers. The 12 largest chains control almost half of daily circulation. Chains, especially those that trade on the stock market, are more eager than single-paper proprietors to raise profit margins. They tend to cut costs by firing reporters and editors. As the number of newspapers in a chain goes up, the size of the newshole tends to shrink. Soft-news coverage goes up. Local coverage may increase or decrease as a percentage of the whole, but the articles tend to get shorter in either case. As for local TV, serious reporting is scarce enough there but is more likely to be found on the occasional independent station (like Oakland's KTVU) than from a station owned by a network or a chain.

Not nearly enough attention has been paid to the consequences of conglomeration in book publishing. At this writing, there remains one independently owned major commercial publishing company in New York (W.W. Norton). In general, the giants seem more reluctant to publish the so-called midlist. They are far less willing than before the great wave of mergers in the 1980s to use their cash cows to subsidize less commercial but worthy authors throughout what may turn out to be unremunerative careers. Like Hollywood studios, they bet big on blockbuster prospects. This does nothing for the culture but make fortunes.

The point is not that the media were once fearless and are suddenly in danger of becoming fearful, or that entertainment was once stupendous and is suddenly in danger of dumbing down. (Network television in the fabled '60s, for instance, was largely brain-dead.) The point is that the changes now in progress are largely irreversible, potentially consequential, and they are being left to marketeers whose commitment to the public is dubious. The fact of diversification is being offered up as proof that there's no danger.

Now it is true that two phenomena have grown simultaneously in America's media. One is conglomeration. The other is segmentation. Demographic slices are the targets in cable TV, radio, magazines. If choice is the champion goal, then the more choice the better; and clearly Manhattan's Time Warner Cable, with 76 channels, cannot be worse for consumers than the precable array of seven VHF channels. Can it?

Not in the obvious sense, although the proprietors of cable TV have a lock on access. These effective monopolies permit and deny access just as they choose. Accountability is not their game. Giving preferences to their corporate partners is. So is catering to high-spending demographics. But even beyond cable, the standard of comparison ought not to be the impoverished past. The relevant question is about democratic potential. No one who worries about media trusts proposes a return to the narrow pipeline of yesteryear. The question is, What variety of diversity will the titans indulge? Most likely, immense varieties of segmented entertainment.

The thoughtful discussion of ideas is at a premium. The spiral of triviality winds onward. When the possible harms are great and potentially irreversible, is this not a matter for public inquiry? Surely Congress and the press might spare 10 percent of the time, money and energy they have devoted to petty scandals involving the onetime governor of a small state for the rather more momentous question of the impact of centralized power on the nation's sluggish flow of ideas.

Todd Gitlin is professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. His most recent book is The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars.