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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.'"
Unless we fight back against Big Media, we are going to lose, and lose hard, a lot of the things we have come to take for granted in the past 20 years of the Internet...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I thought Ted Turner owned them all...
...that Ted Turner sees this whole conglomerate issue too much in black and white.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
In todays's megacorp world could you imagine starting something like CNN. It was much simpler 25 years ago when Turner did it. Disney, Viacom, AOLTW, Murdoch, it is very hard for a newcomer to break in now. The last newcomer was Fox and thats been over ten years ago. I don't think they would have made it without Murdochs newspaper empire to back them up till they got a foothold.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Mr Bachman and Mr Overdrive?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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
Yes Ted Turner is easily the center of the evils he's complaining about . . . . but well, did anyone RTFA before bashing him?
Sure there's hypocrisy in Turner saying big media should be broken up, but he explains himself rather well. I admit I haven't even read the whole article yet. Maybe he's a little bit bitter (AOL), but he starts by explaining that he could never have gotten started in the current environment and then goes on to detail lots of real problems with the current media. Why can't he just be a very smart old man, who knows more about this topic than probably any of us, and is pissed because his industry is going to hell?
This is like Bill Gates bemoaning monopolistic business practices in the software industry.
NO This is like Bill Gates saying "Microsoft should be broken up to prevent it's detrimental impact on the software market that sifles small business growth." I, for one, would stand up and cheer if Bill Gates said that, but we all know he's not man enough to do the right thing.
PLEASE, let's not pummel this guy for a) doing the right thing b) doing it in a way that will hurt his interestes and c) for his move toward colorizing movies almost 20 YEARS ago
Why not just change the law to make media companies to accommodate to customers needs?
There's already a remedy for customers whose needs aren't being met . . . go someplace else. You don't have to watch CNN, or Fox News, or MSNBC, or others. Your choices will be more limited, but you DO have alternatives. The law will never be as effective as customer demand at compelling businesses to run effectively.
Sadly, the media companies are as successful as they are because the services they provide are popular with the public. Personally, that fact appalls me, but it's the truth.
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
"Well I say he does have to shoot me now! So shoot me now!"
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
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.
That sentence scares the hell out of me. You want laws put in place by politicians that dictate what we want? Every politician has an agenda and bias. I, for one, would never conceed to such a thing. They would pick something even more liberal or conservative than what we already have.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
If the "big media conglomerates" aren't offering people what they want because they have to cater to the largest demographic (lowest common denominator) possible, it seems to me this creates more openings for the smaller fish, as the "big guys" can't afford to tackle and grow the niche markets.
His entire point is that the number of alternatives is getting smaller - and also that all the large media companies have certain interests in common, which may distort their programming.
It's hard to imagine how we'll have a well informed, critically thinking populace if everyone's opinions are manufactured by a few homogenous companies... The only bright spot is the Internet, assuming it doesn't get too watered down.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
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.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
He's actually criticizing himself to some degree too - I have to give him some credit there
His remarks are applicable to lots of media, radio stations (something like 3 companies run 90% of the FM stations), the book publishing industry (small presses are going extinct, and about 4 massive publishers run the market now), bookstores (about a 60% of US independent bookstores have closed in the past 5 years), mega retailers (Home Depot, Wal-Mart, etc) have destroyed the smaller, 'mom & pop' businesses.
While many people think the 'uber' stores are a good thing - ultimately we are often given less choice, more average/mediocre products, and little innovation and originality.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
You haven't won. You've merely gotten out of the immediate battleground, and are ignoring the War.
Part of TT's point is that Big Media is exerting too much control over the news. No matter how good someone may be at making decisions, feed them defective information and the 'perfectly made' decisions based on that information will be defective, too. For instance, your neighbors, your zoning board, voters, etc.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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).
How about it? Let's slashdot bad news agencies!
Imagine that you're in Soviet Russia (where media controls you). You have three networks, but all three of them air the same stories, and are blatantly politically biased towards the government. How are you going to get alternative news? How are you going to have sufficient information to act as a proper democracy? Russia happens to be a good example today, because while it's nominally become a democracy, its media is once again as subserviant to the ruling structures that its democracy is suffering. If you're in Moscow and you want to hear news which is critical of Putin or supportive of anyone else, you're going to have a hard time trying to find media which will air those views.
For those who say that competition between the oligarchs of media will prevent that, look again at Russia. What happens if the government "rewards" those who look favorably on its policies and "punishes" those who don't? Well, if there are 100 sources of news, then it doesn't matter, because they're not going to control all of them. But if there are only 3 or 4? How difficult would it be to "convince" all 3 or 4 major news sources that they should report a particular way on a story?
And diversity of smallish news outlets doesn't help either. If you say "oh, well, we've got these hundred small internet sites and newspapers," the problem is that their credibility is in doubt with most people, because they take information on who to believe is credible from the major sources. So if you say to someone you get your news from NBC, and someone else says that they get their news from FooBar.com, if you're a normal person you're going to think they're a crackpot or incorrectly informed, because it lacks credibility.
So imagine a situation where all major, credible news organizations are controlled by 3 people. Imagine how that would impact democracy. Now tell me that media is just another mature industry.
While I, personally, wouldn't have any trouble with breaking up Ford and GM, (I think it would be nice if all companies greater than a certain size where prevented from owning more than 20% of the market), it really is a different kettle of fish.
For one thing, the media conglomerates control how a large percentage of Americans get their information. Do you really want everyone to hear only the news that Rupert Murdoch thinks you should hear?
For another, the broadcast media companies in particular, are making use of the public airwaves and as such, are required to submit to rules that they provide some public benefit. Broadcasters have been whining about those rules since day one, and have been weaseling their way out of them since day two. The FCC was supposed to act in the public interest, it is sadly much more likely to operate in the corporate interest these days.
Ayn Rand books are nothing but rants (and long, poorly written rants at that) justifying greed for greed's sake. For obvious reasons, the greedy people (particularly right wingers)latched onto these rants as justification for their greedy behavior.