So what happens if the biggest Wall Street players - Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan - wind up with a majority equity stake in, say, radio networks, maybe ultimately TV stations, newspapers and magazines?

Via Taibbi - Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge says don’t look now, but it’s happening:

And lest someone think that this yet another shady space of the corporate finance world may be one that has somehow avoided the tentacles of the squid, think again:

J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are also among radio stations’ leading lenders.

Goldman Sachs and other lenders just swapped debt for 85% of Nassau Broadcasting Partners LP’s equity. Nassau operates 51 radio stations along the East Coast. Nassau had to put its Cape Cod, Mass., stations into a separate company, because Goldman has another radio investment in Cape Cod and didn’t want its stake to cause a conflict with the FCC.

Throw companies like Tribune into the mix where JP Morgan will allegedly end up with an majority equity stake, and one wonders why Goldman and JPM were so eager to provide “rescue” financings to virtually the entire distressed media space: both companies knew too well that sooner or later they would end up with full equity control over essentially the most coveted industry: thousands of TV stations, radio channels, newspaper and magazines. If you thought the media propaganda was unbearable now, just wait. Nonetheless, one doubts that much will be made by the FCC of JP Morgan’s or Goldman Sachs’ stealthily encroaching control of the entire media world. After all, they already pretty much already control the airwaves. This way their domination of the 4th estate and the idiot tube will soon be complete.

Not to get too tinfoil-hatty about it, but isn’t this another step in the Great Consolidation? Why shouldn’t the biggest players in the American economy, too big to fail yet gettting bigger, loading up on even more risk and backstopped by the taxpayers, bail out the ailing media industry? How magnanimous of them. How strategically helpful for them.

Big finance is becoming government, is becoming the media. It’s all melding into one.

Update: As if on cue:

Regulators may borrow billions from big banks to shore up the dwindling fund that insures regular deposit accounts.

The loans would go to the fund maintained by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that insure depositors when banks fail, said industry and government officials familiar with the FDIC board’s thinking, who requested anonymity because the plans are still evolving.

Gee, “big banks.”

I wonder which “big banks” we’re talking about.