An interlude on the Radiohead.com web site entitled “Trustees” has the following text:
Well, they are private trustees. They’re not public trustees. And let’s not forget the Internet was developed through enormous public subsidy, through taxpayer dollars. And yet now we’re in a situation where these mergers are being greeted with exclamations of, if not surprise, then at least, “Wow, this is amazing; this is humongous, $350 billion.”
But the very mass media they’re increasingly corporatized are not asking the fundamental questions about these mergers. And I think people who are sitting at home contemplating what this really portends need to look at demanding and need, in fact, to demand antitrust action because in lieu of that, this is going to be looked at as a horrendous, perhaps irreversible step, towards the concentration of media control in very, very few hands.
Yes, this is the radiohead website.
This text is excerpted from a January 10, 2000 PBS NewsHour interview conducted by Ray Suarez with Jim Ledbetter, Bruce Leichtman, and David Bennahum regarding the AOL/Time Warner merger. This merger has been cited before in Radiohead’s art work.