TO OUR READERS

By WALTER ISAACSON MANAGING EDITOR

Disney and ABC. General Electric and NBC. Westinghouse and CBS. Microsoft and MSNBC. Time Warner and Turner. Among the trends in the media world is consolidation, with sprawling corporations' owning news organizations and raising the specter of conflicting interests and a less diverse babble of journalistic voices. The Nation magazine this summer published an octopus-like chart of media conglomerates, noting that the companies themselves would be unlikely to do so. Herewith, we do so, detailing that of our parent company.

What does this mean for the journalism you get? We believe this question arises whether a news organization is owned by an individual mogul or a big corporation. Either way, the owners have the potential to be benign or meddlesome. Some have a tradition of respecting editorial integrity. Others have ideological biases that they push. A few--private owners as well as public corporations--cater slavishly to their advertisers and powerful pals and seek favorable coverage of their personal causes and business endeavors. Most are bad at covering their own financial interests and dealings. And almost all are commercial enterprises with pressure to grow revenues while containing costs.

As anyone who has worked for an individual press baron knows, these men can be insidious meddlers. On the other hand, sometimes a news operation can be editorially insulated within a large corporation, either because of its heritage or because of a pragmatic realization that intrusive shenanigans tend to backfire publicly and cause more trouble than they are worth.

Henry Luce, in his will, said TIME must be operated not only as a business enterprise but also for the public good. He set up a division of "church" and "state," so that the editorial side of the operation was guaranteed independence from corporate considerations. His system remains intact, but life has got a bit more complex as the company that owns us has grown. Back when we were a small company, our reviewers could, for example, assess a book published by Little, Brown (long owned by Time Inc.) without having anyone (including the reviewer) pay the slightest attention to the connection. Since the merger with Warner, we face a lot more suspicions.

The best safeguard against corporate conflicts is openness and full disclosure, so readers and viewers can watch for any lapses in editorial integrity (hence the chart). Our critics pan some Warner Bros. movies (the Batman series, I've noticed, has sometimes been brutalized) and praise others, purely as they see fit. The same is true for the music, TV shows and other productions of the far-flung divisions of Time Warner. If any readers or watchdog groups discern a pattern of dishonest judgments, they can (and should) flail us.

However, we hope they won't impugn our integrity if they lack specific evidence. Someone who did look into this issue found that Warner products have, it so happens, been featured on TIME covers far, far fewer times than on competing magazines'. But we welcome continued vigilance. And we'll continue to be vigilant ourselves, since any compromise of our editorial integrity would destroy not only our magazine but also our careers. Having worked at this company for 18 years, I can confidently say that if there were any corporate meddling, the first public yelps would (and should) come from our own writers and reporters.

We also have to continue to prove ourselves hard-nosed in covering our own corporation, something that news organizations large and small have historically done poorly. Personally, I think we produced a good, tough cover story last year on the impact of violence and obscenity in movies and music, and on the crusade against Time Warner being led by Bill Bennett (who ended up on our "Most Influential Americans" list this year). This week we try to do a fair and honest job of looking at the strains caused by Time Warner's merger with Turner Broadcasting and at the bitter battles and strange alliances among the growing number of news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox. We initially failed to cover the Time Warner merger when it was announced seven years ago, but we learned our lesson quickly and tried to cover subsequent corporate dealings as we would any business story.

In the digital age, the trend is not toward media concentration but toward a wondrous diversity of voices. Each month dozens of new publications and Websites and information services are born. Only those that each day earn the trust of their users and readers will survive. At TIME we're not always going to be perfect in our judgments and criticism. But we promise that the mistakes we make will be due to our editorial fallibility rather than to corporate kowtowing. We'll keep foremost in our minds that our credibility, openness and editorial honesty are all we have to offer as journalists and as a magazine.