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Fri. May 30, 2003

Twistin' with Ted

Twistin’ with Ted – It may not be obvious, but I’ve always admired Ted Turner. I disagree with many of his political stances, and cringe at the things that sometimes emit from The Mouth of the South. But good golly, if the man is not a complete genius, he is at least a savant of some type.

He inherited his father’s bankrupt billboard business in the 70’s, and turned it into a multimedia empire in less than a decade. Along the way he won the America’s Cup, started what was once called the Chicken Noodle Network, and even managed the Atlanta Braves team he’d bought …. for one game. And that was all before 1982.

You may be more familiar with the Ted of the last 20 years, the multi-billionaire who owns more land than any private individual on the planet. Much of that money and land came from selling his empire, Turner Broadcasting, to Time Warner. And that’s the perspective he offers in an editorial in today’s Washington Post.

“It’s hard to compete when your suppliers are owned by your competitors. We bought MGM, and we later sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner, because we had little choice. The big were getting bigger. The small were disappearing. We had to gain access to programming to survive.”

He makes some very valid points, but he loses me here: “When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas. People who own their own businesses are their own bosses. They are independent thinkers. They know they can’t compete by imitating the big guys; they have to innovate. So they are less obsessed with earnings than they are with ideas. They’re willing to take risks.”

Ted may be one of the best known media innovators, risk takers, and independent thinkers of the past few decades. So how can he possibly also believe “we had little choice” but to sell to Time Warner, especially when he has since said that he should have bought them?

He had a choice. He chose to sell, and take the money. Just like the owner of the radio station I used to work at, he was already a rich man, but when he got a big offer to sell his properties, he took it. It was not a hostile corporate takeover, it was a choice. Earnings overruled ideas.

Ted (and his shareholders) might argue it was the correct business decision at that time. Maybe. But today, we’re all crying about the results; a few corporations controlling a vast chunk of our media. Ted apparently is crying, too, and while I agree with his points, he doesn’t get much sympathy from me. He can decry the current state of Big Media, but he made a choice, and that choice contributed to the problem we face today.

However, Ted’s always been one to look to the future, and he closes with some good advice: “If, on Monday, the FCC decides to go the other way, that should not be the end of it. Powerful public groups across the political spectrum oppose these new rules and are angry about their lack of input in the process. People who can’t make their voices heard in one arena often find ways to make them heard in others. Congress has the power to amend the rule changes. Members from both parties oppose the new rules. This isn’t over.”