Sen. John Kerry is no fan of mega-mergers and big media, even though he boasts plenty of powerful friends at some of the largest congloms in the country.

Just one day after touting his business endorsements from such media heavies as News Corp.'s Peter Chernin, Paramount's Sherry Lansing and Viacom's Tom Freston, Democratic presidential nominee Kerry told an audience of minority journalists Thursday that he opposed the idea of big media conglomerates growing even bigger.

"I'm against the ongoing push for media consolidation," he said during a Q&A at the Unity 2004 conference. "It's contrary to the stronger interests of the country."

Kerry went on to say he believes the Federal Communications Commission's decision last year to relax rules governing media concentration should be reversed. If he were president, he said, he would pursue a media policy seeking as diverse and broad an ownership as possible.

"It is critical to who we are as free people," he said firmly. "It's critical to our democracy."

The trouble with characterizing the media as "liberal" has always been that in spite of any possible personal liberal lean on the part of reporters and editors (most of whom do their best to compensate for it, and in fact end up overcompensating), the ownership of the media has become more and more corporate, and, as consolidation continues apace, more and more concentrated in the hands of a few powerful business people who are not only politically conservative, but also dedicated to corporate power, which many times will have interests antithetical to the promotion of democracy.

The problem wasn't nearly as acute when the management of the news media's corporate owners were, in some measure, dedicated to preserving and protecting an objective kind of journalism, and news organizations were to a significant extent independent within the corporate structure. They weren't expected to make a profit, they were considered to be something like "loss leaders" in a supermarket which lose money when sold but serve the function of attracting people into the store. To have a good news division within a television network, for instance, was considered to be a sign of a quality operation, and journalists were, more or less, free from corporate control or hassling.

That's all changed, of course. News organizations are now expected to be corporate profit centers, which alone would increase the input and control inflicted on them by their corporate masters, but when you add in the effects of consolidation and the rise of the all-powerful media baron, such as Rupert Murdoch, you have a situation where every single reporter and editor in every single news organization could be a wild-eyed anarchist, and the resulting news coverage would still show a marked conservative bias. (Probably.)

Anyway, think of Kerry's remarks the next time you see some coverage of him and his campaign by the SCLM that appears slanted or inappropriate. Being on record as opposing increased corporate consolidation certainly can't have won him many friends in high places in the media. (Although, according the the Variety piece, he does have some:

In addition to Chernin, Lansing and Freston, other major players in the entertainment world [supporting Kerry] include Warner Music Group topper Edgar Bronfman Jr., as well as his father, Edgar Bronfman Sr.; Sony Pictures Entertainment topper Michael Lynton and Sony Motion Picture Group chair Amy Pascal; entertainment mogul Kirk Kerkorian; DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg; Oxygen Media topper Geraldine Laybourne; retired Time Warner chieftain Gerald Levin; Discovery Communications prexy Judith McHale; Saban Capital Group topper Haim Saban; Nickelodeon Networks exec veep Marva Smalls; and Miramax co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein.