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Ted Turner's Beef With Big Media
pizen writes "Washington Monthly has an article from Ted Turner where he talks about the problems with the media conglomerates and calls for them to be busted: 'At this late stage, media companies have grown so large and powerful, and their dominance has become so detrimental to the survival of small, emerging companies, that there remains only one alternative: bust up the big conglomerates.'"
All of this you are speaking of happened after Ted Turner was bought out. He started the companies, but sold off most of them, including CNN. This was before the merger.
He frequently talks about how much he regrets selling CNN because it is a shell of the channel it once was. He feels the channel is no longer balanced and is now more propaganda and fluff based (lots of entertainment news now) in order to keep up with Fox News.
"BEHOLD, CORN!!" - Dr. Weird, ATHF
He owns at least three stations that I can think of... TNT, TBS and Turner Classic Movies.
No, those networks are owned by Time-Warner. Go to tbssuperstation.com, www.tnt.tv, or turnerclassicmovies.com, and at the bottom you'll see the text "A Time Warner Company."
Most people didn't RTFA and made the obvious comment about his being a big media company.
Quoth the article:
"This wasn't necessarily bad for Turner Broadcasting; we had already achieved scale. But seeing these rules changed was like watching someone knock down the ladder I had already climbed."
To sum up the point that he made in the article, small media companies have more management freedom and thus a greater freedom to innovate. These innovations cause change in the greater world as larger conglomerates start "me-too" enterprises to compete with the new company. By changing rules to favor larger companies, it kills the innovation happening even at the large ones (since the practice of "me-too" requires someone to do it first).
He simply wants the same opportunities for other people that he had.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
People are saying Turner is the proverbial kettle calling the pot black. They miss the point.
Yes, he built CNN but no longer owns it. He has no control of AOL Time Warner, and if he did it is quite clear they would be a very different company. The empire building is not his doing. I've read a lot of interviews with Turner, and he strikes me as a bombastic and determined man, but he has always been against "The Big Guys" and trying to battle for "The Little Guys" because he's always seen himself as the little guy. Go read a history of CNN to see what I mean.
As for the general point of this article, he has a point. The company that disturbs me the most actually is Disney. Down in Florida they have effectively got their own government for several hundred thousand square acres, they have a town in which they control everything (called Celebration IIRC), they have changed state law so that nobody can be declared dead on Disney property, and have interests in more government projects than an entertainment company really should. They are literally, not figuratively, a law unto themselves. How the hell did that happen? How can you compare Turner's business interests with that lot?
On a day when I have readjusted my outlook on life in general after reading the slashdot article and associated links on Joe Trippi, thinking about this stuff just makes me mad quite frankly.
And if you'd RTFA, he completely covers that point - noting why it happened, why he would do it again, and why its horribly, horribly broken to be able to.
The government isnt doing its job, and he makes it clear that big media will only get bigger unless government starts doing its job again.
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This is a perfect example of RTFA. In fact, the entire article was pretty much devoted to answering that question. The rules have changed, and the (now permitted) consolodation of media makes it impossible for a new player to break in. The current media conglomerates own everything from top to bottom. Any new player would have to rely on one of these conglomerates for something (programming, distribution, etc.). The conglomerates would swat or buy out their new competitor as soon as it showed any potential of being successful (if it ever got a chance to get that far).
But arabnews.com is "big media", just not american big media. arabnews.com is owned by "Saudi Research and Marketing Group" which owns the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat which they claim is a leading arab newspaper (see http://www.hhsaudi.com/about.html)