The Merger and Our Journalism

By Norman Pearlstine, Editor-in-Chief Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor

Ever since our sister publications FORTUNE and LIFE were born in the 1930s, the decade after our own founding, TIME has been part of an ever growing media company. And with that expansion came the challenge of being fair and honest when covering matters that could affect the business interests of the corporation that owned us.

By the end of the 1980s, those interests were becoming complex. Time Inc., which had become a public company in 1964, owned not only 24 magazines but also Little, Brown books, HBO and a growing cable system. But the journalistic principle remained simple: we should be honest in our judgments and truthful in our reporting. A church-state wall was established to protect those of us on the edit side from corporate influence.

We've had a lot of practice applying this principle over the past 10 years. Our corporation's mergers with Warner Communications and then Turner Broadcasting created the world's largest media company, with sprawling and entangled interests (see chart, page 40). But we believe our record will show that we have not favored or disfavored the products of any company. Nor have we shied away from covers on topics--violence in the media and degrading music lyrics come to mind--that questioned the practices of the media industry, including Time Warner.

Time Warner's planned merger with AOL will create a corporation that is even bigger and more complex. But the principle that guides our journalism is just as simple as it has always been. A respect for journalistic independence has been part of our company's values for so long that it's encoded in our DNA, and the only way our magazine can remain successful is if we continue that approach. If there are failures in judgment, it will be the fault of the editors and journalists here, as it has always been, not of the corporate structure or policies.

These days most major magazines have an array of intertwined alliances and deals with networks and Internet services. These need not be corrupting. Nor does bigness, in and of itself, make a company good or bad. What matters is the values of the people who work there.

We believe that the values we hold, most notably that of editorial integrity, translate directly into what value our magazine has to you. In a world filled with countless sources of information old and new, the ones most likely to succeed are the ones with the most credibility.

So even as we cover the corporate complexities that swirl around us, let us assure you that we--as individual journalists and critics with pride in what we do--will continue to be loyal to and represent the interests of our most important constituency, our readers.

Norman Pearlstine, Editor-in-Chief

Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor