Even without February 19th’s US federal court decision, which removes the block on media companies owning both cable systems and local broadcasters in the same market, the era of media mergers was far from over. Now, it will surely accelerate.

The recent spate of mergers represents the last throes of a consolidation that started a dozen years ago and has been marked by such deals as Time merging with Warner, buying Turner Broadcasting, and then selling itself to America Online; Disney buying ABC; Viacom buying CBS; and Vivendi buying Universal. Recent months have seen such combinations as Comcast and AT&T Broadband, EchoStar and DirecTV, Vivendi Universal and USA Networks. Critics of media concentration will now wonder how much more wheeling and dealing can go on before there are but one or two juggernauts controlling every image, syllable, and sound of information and entertainment.

Actually, the industry has a long way to go yet before it reaches that point. There are more than 100 media companies worldwide, with more than $1 billion in revenues; and entertainment and media are still fragmented compared with other industries such as pharmaceuticals or aerospace. As part of the next merger wave, even the biggest...