Washington Monthly - Ted Turner: My Beef With Big Media

[mandyky]

How government protects big media--and shuts out upstarts like me.

In the late 1960s, when Turner Communications was a business of billboards and radio stations and I was spending much of my energy ocean racing, a UHF-TV station came up for sale in Atlanta. It was losing $50,000 a month and its programs were viewed by fewer than 5 percent of the market.
I acquired it.

When I moved to buy a second station in Charlotte--this one worse than the first--my accountant quit in protest, and the company's board vetoed the deal. So I mortgaged my house and bought it myself. The Atlanta purchase turned into the Superstation; the Charlotte purchase--when I sold it 10 years later--gave me the capital to launch CNN.

Both purchases played a role in revolutionizing television. Both required a streak of independence and a taste for risk. And neither could happen today. In the current climate of consolidation, independent broadcasters simply don't survive for long. That's why we haven't seen a new generation of people like me or even Rupert Murdoch--independent television upstarts who challenge the big boys and force the whole industry to compete and change.

Read more at -
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0407.turner.html

[Merlin]

1. This is a KEEPER ! It's a study in the formation of oligopolies.

Be sure to read the last graph. He calls for a new era of trust busting of broadcast media concentration.

His arguments are so compelling, he could single-handedly turn this into a national issue. This is an issue that has legs.

[struggle4progress]

2. Worth the read. eom

[teryang]

3. "Bust up the big conglomerates"

Right on.