Ted Turner's Media Legend and the Transformationof CorporateLiberalism Eric Guthey• ResearchFellow in theSorely of Scholars, VisitingAssistant Profissor ofLar6 Histo.ty,and Communication UniversityofMichigan Business School A•Atlanta]ournalandConstitution op-ed piece published the dayafter the announcementof Time-Warner'sproposed acquisition of the TurnerBroad- castingSystem in September1995 lamentedthe problemsthe latestmedia mega-dealposed for true believersin the legendof Ted Turner.Although Turnerwould become the largestsingle shareholder in thelargest media giant in the world, conservativecolumnist Dick Williams fearedTurner would lose hismuch-fabled autonomy and independent owner status. "Say it ain'tso," the columnistdemanded of CaptainOutrageous directly. "Say you aren't selling out andsuccumbing to thesuits at RockefellerCenter." Explained Williams: The beautyof TurnerBroadcasting has been that k wasn'tpart of the herd.Even Turner Entertainment cooks up its wonders here, in the real United States, far from the face-lifted and liposuckedphonies of Hollywood...It's probablytrue that your empirehad to getbigger or die.And you have been handicapped by TimeWamer's presence on yourboard. After theybailed you out,it musthave been like going to workwith a loanshark's en- forcer.But you'vealways been the typeto beatthem, not join them[Williams, 1995]. Williamsheld Turner up as the paragonof the independentand self- determiningbroadcast and cable entrepreneur, the outspokeneveryman who had built a careeron buckingthe establishmentwith improbablerisks and provingthe expertswrong. Unlike the facelesssuits at Time-Warner,in Williams'view a collectionof rich, Ivy-leaguesissies who couldn'twalk to work,chew tobacco, or high-fivea blackbasketball star even if theytried, Turner was a real man who lived in the "real United States,"and he had built "a businessthat respected everyday folks." As themost important independent

1 I wouldlike to thankJon Byrd, Andrew McAlister, and Michael Szalay for their insightfulcomments on this article.Thanks also to the Centerfor AmericanStudies at OdenseUniversity, Denmark, and the Society of Scholarsat the Universityof Michigan BusinessSchool for institutional support. My book-lengthstudy of TedTurner is currently undercontract with the University of CaliforniaPress. BU.S.INESS AND ECONOMIC HISTORY,Volume twenty-six, no. 1, Fall1997. Copyright¸1997 by theBusiness History Conference. ISSN 0894-6825.

184 TED TURNER'S MEDIA LEGEND / 185 voicein printand broadcast media, Williams reminded Turner, he hadproven that he wasn'tjust lucky, he had createdworldwide news and entertainment networks,he hadhelped tear down the Iron Curtain,and most importantly, he haddone it all "in style." Thisview of Turnerhas evolved over the years in legionsof newspaper, magazine,and television profiles, five remarkably similar pop/commercial bi- ographies,and a ghost-writtenautobiography that Turner decidednot to publish[Vaughn, 1975, 1978; Williams,1981; Meyer, 1989; Bibb, 1993; Goldbergand Goldberg, 1995; Turner and Klein, 1987]. In all of thesesources, Turnercuts a larger-than-lifefigure whose business ventures take the form of heroicmissions on behalfof his ever expandingmarket share. The Turner legendreceived perhaps its most pristine articulation in 1992,when Time maga- zinecrowned Turner "Man of theYear" and "Prince of the GlobalVillage." A generationago, Time explained, Marshall McLuhan had declaredprematurely that communicationstechnology had createda "borderlessworld," of "all-at- once-ness,"[sic]a "simultaneous happening" in which'"time' has ceased" and '"space'has vanished." But by 1991,McLuhan's dream had come true - thanks to the effortsof fellowvisionary Turner, who like McLuhan exhibited "a pas- sionatesense of whatis eternalin humannature and also of whatis comingbut asof yet unseen,just over the horizon."In the precedingyear, Turner's Cable NewsNetwork had provided live coverage as U.S. forces bombarded Baghdad andas Russian leader Boris Yeltsin defied a mih'tarycoup from the top of a tank.Ted Turnerhimself had becomea primemover of suchglobal events, Timeproposed, because as a resultof CNN "momentousthings happened preciselybecause they were being seen as they happened." No doubtencouraged by the fact that its parentcompany Time-Warner owned a 21.9% shareof TurnerBroadcasting at the time, the magazine concluded that Turner deserved the title of "1992 Man of the Year" because he had transformed viewers in 150countries into "instant witnesses of history"and had proven that "the world canbe brought together by telecommunications" [Painton, 1992, pp. 22, 23]. It's tempttingto dismissthis kind of mediahype, but I proposethat his- toriansshould take it quiteseriously, not onlyas a repositoryof hiddenclues to Turner'ssignificance, but asa verycrucial element of thatsignificance as well. In thispaper I raisethree points about Ted Tumer's media image as a meansof explaininghow and why I amworking on yetanother book on Turner. My f•rstpoint is methodological- it concernshow we shouldapproach thepublic image of a figurelike Turner, given the disparity I will outlinebriefly betweenthat image and some of the hardfacts of Ted Tumer'scareer. When youlook closely, you find thatTed Turnerdidn't invent air. With respectto everyvisionary Turner "breakthrough," a whole network of intersectingcausal factorscomes into play, including historical, economic, and regulatory develop- mentsin broadcasting,cable, and satellitetechnology, other people's ideas, decisions,connections, and skills, and even more slippery cultural shifts beyond anyindividual's control. This raises the complexhistoriographical question of how to assignrehtive causal weight to Turner'sown actions on the onehand, and structural determinants on the other. 186 / ERIC GUTHEY

Next I wantto bracketthat question, and propose that even if theimage of Ted Turner'sunfettered agency is in certainrespects a fiction,it is stilla fictionwith agency,rhetorically persuasive because it both reconcilesand recaststhe classicliberal tension between individual autonomy and the en- croachmentsof collectivegovernment, bureaucratic, or corporateorganization. Turner'smedia image does this in new waysthat fundamentallyredirect the corporateliberal response to thisdilemma - especiallyas it relatesto broadcast policyand media regulation - for a newhistorical moment. That newmoment - callit neo-Fordism,post-Fordism, the rise of flexibleaccumulation, the era of deregulationand globalization- parallelsthe turn-of-the-centurytransfor- marionin the fabricof capitalistand corporateorganization Martin Sklar and othersassociate with the riseof corporateliberalism itself, but elevatesentre- preneurialprinciples and market relations as solutionsto problemspreviously resolvedby corporateliberal emphases on rationalization,bureaucratizafion, andregulatory intervention [Streeter, 1996; Sklar, 1988; Lustig, 1982]. I will concludewith someobservations about how this heightened emphasison entrepreneurshipand market relations lies at the heartof whathas been calledthe discourseof enterprise.As a symbolicfigurehead for the transitiontowards this kind of culturaldiscourse, Ted Tumer collapsesthe individualand the corporate in waysthat just might point towards a solutionto the methodologicaldilemmas raised by my firstpoint, and perhaps even lead theway to a newkind of businessbiography altogether.

Media Legend vs. Market Reality

First the methodologicalquestion - what to do with the distance betweenthe languagethat swirlsaround Ted Turnerand the actualfacts of his career.According to the legend,Turner is a self-mademan because,after his father'ssuicide in 1963,the 24 year-oldcollege dropout rescued the family's "failing"outdoor advertising business from the jawsof voraciouscompetitors andsingle-handedly "turned it around"in the faceof "overwhelmingodds" by clintof hisdriving will to succeedand innate business acumen. In 1970,Turner riskedeverything he hadworked so hard to achievewhen he boughta failing, ragtagAtlanta UHF stationand reversedits fortunesby meansof a unique counterprogramming strategy that flewin the faceof broadcastindustry logic. ThereafterTurner's career becomes a successionof far-sightedrisks that take the entiremedia industry by surpriseone after the other- goingcable "when cablewasn't cool"; creating the world's f•rst broadcast superstation; mounting CNN; acquiringa majorHollywood ffirn library and spinning off severalnew successfulcable channels; and finallylaunching himself into the orbit of the reallybig boys with theTime-Warner deal. Newsweek summed up the themeof Turner'scareer after the launchof CNN by quotingthen Chairof the FCC CharlesFerris. "He exemplifiesthe entrepreneurialspirit that will help shape thenew information age," Ferris said of Turner."He's shaking up the industry" [Waters,1980, p. 59]. TED TURNER'S MEDIA LEGEND / 187

Muchlike a Hollywoodfilm, the Tumer story proceeds according to a linear,character-centered narrative. The causallogic driving the storyis always personaland psychological, even Oedipal - we getbehind the veil of celebrity to learnwhat makes Tumer tick. In themost perceptive review of theTurner legendto date,Pat Aufderheidesummarizes Tumex's very public"private" storyas follows: Tumer's manic-depressive father was demanding and abusive, andthe manic-depressive son has been trying to bothlive up to andstand up to his father ever since.Like the titular characterin CitizenKane (one of Tumex'sfavorite movies), his struggle to buildan empire is atone and the same timea struggleto exorcisechildhood ghosts, but unlikehis fatherand unlike Kane,Ted Turnerhas successfully avoided both suicide and the lonely exile of Xanaduwith the help of lithiumand JaneFonda, instead channeling his messianicenergies into his pet project of savingthe world [Aufderheide, 1995, p. 36]. The problemwith thiskind of therapeuticnarrative, as Aufderheide pointsout, is that Tumer'spersonality alone doesn't sufficiently explain the manychanges in themedia industry that have been attributed to him.I would addthat it doesn'teven account fully for his own businesssuccess. History doesn'twork that way. For example,it is simplynot the casethat the young Ted Turnerrescued his late father'sfailing billboard company from financial ruin. Probaterecords and other sourcesshow that beforeTumer's fatherdied, he hadconstructed an outdooradvertising company worth roughly around $3.2million, on debtof about$1 million (in 1963dollars) ["Estate of R. Edward Turner,deceased," circa 1963]. The company'scombined annual cash flow fromoperations topped $1 million,and it camecomplete with excess amounts of prime downtownreal estatethat could be sold off to servicethe debt [Turner CommunicationsCorporation, 1971]. More importantly,federal largessein the form of the 1954Tax Codehad turnedbillboards into tax free cashcows - special,accelerated depreciation schedules could be usedto shield revenuesin sucha waythat they could be plowedback into expanding opera- tions.Every sevenyears you couldsimply sell the companyto yourselfand jump-startthe depreciationclock all overagain, which the Tumersdid [U.S. Tax Court,1966; Yellon, 1960, p. 957,972]. "It's an excellentbusiness if it's properlymanaged," one of Turner'sformer billboard associates has remarked, "andits a goodbusiness even if itsrun mediocre. Its justhard to messup at if youhave any kind of businessknowledge whatsoever" [Author's interview with ClaudeWilliams, 1993]. So therereally was no failingfamily business for Ted Turnerto rescuein thefirst place, which was why he was able to startspending monthsat a timeout on the sailing circuit shortly after his father's death. Turnerbecame much more heavily involved in his companyafter he boughtinto television in 1970,but he didn'texactly place himself on thebrink of financialruin. Again, depreciation accounting practices fueled the legend. Financialstatements indicate that the company posted a lossof $334,000that year- largelybecause the televisionstation lost around $900,000. But adjust- mentsfor depreciationwrite-offs not requiringactual cash outlay produced a positivecash flow from operations of $298,000.For taxpurposes the company 188 / ERIC GUTHEY usedaccelerated depredation schedules that gave it $635,000of positivecash flow. In 1971, even usingthe longerdepreciation schedules, the company showeda positive cash flow of $938,000(on losses of $639,000at thetelevision station).By 1972Channel 17 itselfbegan turning a profit[Turner Communica- tionsCorporation, 1971; 1972, p. 1]. This wasnot necessarilybecause of Ted Tumer'suntutored savvy at televisionprogramming. He wasa fantasticsalesman of televisiontime, and he usedhis billboards to promotethe stationaround the citywith typicalTurner zeal.But Robert McKinsey, the man who had run the station from its launch in 1967until Turner bought it, hadinstituted the exactsame strategy of counter programmingcheap reruns for whichTurner has receivedso muchcredit [Author'sphone interview with W. RobertMcKinsey, 1995; Jones, 1967]. Moreover,no amountof programminggenius would have "saved" Channel 17 hadit not beenfor the 1962All ChannelReceiver Act andcertain subsequent FCC rulings,which required manufacturers to put UHF dialson theirtelevision sets,and later stipulated that those dials click in placethe way VHF dialsdid. Becauseof thesefederal interventions, the majority of UHF stationsaround the countrywere in the blackby 1972- not becausethey were all run by heroic risk-takerslike Ted Turner,but simplybecause enough people owned TV sets capableof tuningthem in [Gatdiner,1968, p. 29; "Color,Multi-Set and UHF Penetration,"1972/1973]. As for Tumer'sprescient mixing of UHF and cable,several factors deservemention. McKinsey and the initial investors in Channel17 hadformed then companyin 1964 as a pay TV/cable venture (part of Paramount's Telemetersystem). Then ideawas to sidestepthe formidablebarriers to entry into the televisionbusiness by meansof an alternativestructure of distribution [McKinsey,1967, p. 654].Only after local movie theater and broadcast interests blockedthe venture did they decide to openshop, for thetime being, as a UHF station.The peoplewho had sold Turner his other station in Charlotte,North Carolinaalso had seenthe valueof boostingthe reachof a UHF stationby meansof cableas earlyas 1966,although their effortsfailed too [Author's phoneinterview with Dr. HaroldW. Twisdale,1995; U.S. Court of Appealsfor theFourth Circuit, 1976]. We areoften reminded that Tumer's strategy flew in the faceof industryconventions, but by 1970broadcasters themselves owned 32% of all cablesystems, and that number continued to climb[Sterling, 1979, p. 303;Thomas, 1972, p. 88].Finally and most importantly, FCC ruleshanded downin 1972required virtually all cablesystems within a 300-mileradius of Atlantato carryChannel 17 [TurnerCommunications Corporation, 1972, p. 3]. Likewise,Tumer's lionization as the "Supermanof the Superstation" ignoresthe fact that the momentumof telecommunicationsregulation, the shapeand directionof which had its rootsin businessand governmental decisionsmade before Turner was even born, had made the advent of the superstationall but inevitableby the mid-1970s.Turner was positioned to get therefirst, for a varietyof reasonsincluding his own personality and behavior, but no amountof visionarythinking could have brought the superstationinto beingwithout the proper regulatory environment. "Turner rode the wave - he TED TURNER'S MEDIA LEGEND / 189 didn't createit," saysHarry Shooshan,who playeda prominentrole in Superstationpolitics by virtueof hisposition as Chief Counsel to theHouse CommunicationsSubcommittee during this period. "The wave was created by cable,by HBO, by theOpen Skies ruling, and by a hostof otherregulatory changes.But Tumer got his surfboard out early and rode it all theway to the shore"[Author's phone interview with Harry Shooshan, 1994]. In my workon Tumerso far, I've spenta lot of timelooking at that wave,largely as a reactionagainst all the attentionlavished on what a great surferTurner was. Turner presents the greattemptation to join the endless, circulardebate over structureversus agency, to choosebetween the organizationaljuggernaut and the Marxistslining up on one sideand the entrepreneurialenthusiasts digging in theirheels on theother, insisting, in the wordsof HaroldLivesay, that "people matter above all else, and they matter in termsof personality"[Livesay, 1989, p. 5]. Of coursegreat man apologists abstractthe individualout of all context.But if youposit structure as causal agentyou simply replicate the problemby reifyingorganizational imperatives, or technology,or capital.In the end, the kind of structuraldebunking I've summarizedhere leavesyou with the self-evidentbut otherwiseuseless observationthat someonewould have eventually created a superstationand a CNN even if Ted Turner had never existed.

Media Legend Revisited:The Transformationof CorporateLiberalism

One way aroundthis dilemmais to pay closeattention to the legend itself.In the columnI quotedat the outset,Dick Williamsframes Tumer's decisionto sellhis companyto Time-Warnerin moral terms."Ted, you're aboutto becomethe problemyou've railed about through most of your career,"he says."You're proposing to becomevice chairman of Time Warner Inc., the sortof mediacolossus you profess to fear,the sortof companythat producesthe filth you once swore to fight."Williams fears the implications of Turner'sdecision, because, as he puts it, "A dangerousconcentration of media poweris underway, allowing a handfulof companiesto swallowthe television andradio markets... That great principle of Americanbroadcasting, localism, is soonto giveway in nearlyevery large market to suitswho reportto vice presidentswho report to corporatebean counters" [Williams, 1995]. One getsthe sensethat what's at stakehere is not onlyTed Tumer's autonomy,but thevery principle of autonomousagency itself, and it's at stake becauseof theencroachment of thegiant, faceless corporation, as embodied by Time-Warner.Williams is exhortingthe quintessentialAmerican entrepreneur- heronot to becomejust another slouching organization man. The forceof his rhetoricdepends on thespectre of theperennial threat to liberaldemocratic so- cietyposed by therise of thecorporation. In thewords of AllenKaufman and LawrenceZacharias, "the preeminentinstitution of the modernmarketplace, themanagerial corporation, has regularly incited debates over its benefitsfor democraticpractices, the market,and liberty itself," because "modern corpo- rate society[threatens] to reducethe individual,America's basic element of 190 / ERIC GUTHEY constitutionallogic, to apparentsodological irrelevance" [Kaufman and Zachadas,1992, p. 16]. The corporateliberal solution to this problemcentered on rational- ization,bureaucratizafion, and the constructionof the Fordistregulatory state. It alsomobili•.ed a popularfaith in themorally beneficent power of technology managedby expertsto helpindividuals realize and exercise their freedom [see for exampleNoble, 1977].In his recentbook Sellingthe Air. A Critiqueof the Poliffof CorainertialBroadcasting in the United States, Thomas St_teeter argues that Americancommercial broadcasting exemplifies these developments, and rep- resents"an institutionalenactment of the centralcorporate liberal hope and operatingassumption: that expertise can solve the dilemmasof liberalismin a corporateconsumer economy, that it can squareprinciples of individualism, privateproperty and a neutralrole of law with the fact of collective,bu- reaucraticinstitutions" [St_teeter, 1996, p. xv.].The historyof broadcastreg- ulationbears out Stteeter'spoint. The RadioAct of 1927and the Communica- tionsAct of 1934reduced the power struggle over the control of the airwaves to a scientificmatter to be resolvedby expertise- the FCC woulddole out accessto theelectto-magnetic spectrum - and legitimized the corporate control of the newlyrationalized ether by meansof the corporateliberal ideals of localismand the public interest. Even though managed by privatecompanies, commercialbroadcasting would be a trulydemocratic system because individ- ual licenseeswould servetheir communitiesas publictrustees, providing programsof localinterest and concern and facilitating a broad range of local expressionover the airwaves[see for exampleHorwitz, 1989,p. 157, 189; Douglas,1987, Chapter 6; LeDuc,1973, p. 43ff.]. But this systemcould not evenaddress the two most salientfacts of Americanbroadcasting - commercial advertising and networking. The massive economiesof scaleinherent in networkingensured that the big moneyin broadcastingwould come primarily from national advertising, and this left local licenseeswith littleincentive or powerto servethe idiosyncratic needs of their own communityin anyreal sense. Clinging to the hazyideal of localism,the FCC endedup promotingand protectinga virtualoligopoly of three all powerfulnational networks. Broadcast policy thus fell prey to the classic paradoxof Americanprogressive reform - it soughtto createinstitutions that wouldreturn the nation to an idealized,simpler time when there was no need for suchinstitutions, and this paved the wayfor the growthof evenbigger institutions[see for exampleRowland, 1982]. This is the historical context in which Ted Turner arrives to work his magic.Appearing before Congress in 1976to arguefor hisfight to launchthe superstation,he declared: If I cannotdo a goodenough job to attractthe viewers to my stationin the freeand open marketplace, then I do not deserve thoseviewers. I do not think that I should,by government regulation,be protectedso peoplewill not haveanything to TED TURNER'S MEDIA LEGEND / 191

watchbut my station,I do not thinkthat is fair [U.S.House of Representatives,1976, p. 459]. Offeringhimself as an entrepreneurialalternative to thepower-hungry networks,Turner went on: You haveto rememberthere are three supemetworks who only own four of five stationsapiece that are controlling the way this nationthinks and raking off exorbitantprofits... They have an absolute,a virtual stranglehold,on what Americanssee and think,and I thinka lot of timesthey do notoperate in thepublic good.I cameinto the independenttelevision station business because I believe there should be more voices heard than the networkvoices out of New York, and more opportunityfor programselection by the Americanpeople [U.S. House of Representatives,1976, p. 459]. Turner was arguingthat he shouldsuffer no federallyimposed compunctionto serveas a trusteeof thepublic good, and that Congress should abolishrestrictions to entryin the televisionindustry based on thatprinciple. But he wasalso arguing that the removalof thoserestfictions would allow him to be a betterpublic trustee by virtueof themorally ameliorative power of free competition,which would supply an ever greater diversity of goodsand protect thepublic's freedom of choice."We should be thankful that the marketplace is allowingmore competitionand diversification,"Turner saidduring Senate hearingsin 1979during which he held up the superstation asan example of the benefitsof deregulation."Television is becoming a consumer product. That's the big differencebetween what the futureholds and what the networkswant to keepgiving us" [U.S. Senate, 1979, p. 2145]. Of course,these arguments didn't spring full grownfrom Ted Tumer's head- theyfloated thick in theair he had been breathing ever since he bought intothe broadcasting industry in 1968.Channel 17's former president Robert McKinseyhad seizedupon these exact arguments when he wentbefore the CommunicationsSubcommittee himself in the fall of 1967to lobbyfor the rightto launcha subscriptiontelevision service. This same rhetoric was also the commoncurrency at thecable conventions Turner had been attending over the pastfour years or so,and it wasthe lingua franca of thebroadcast reform move- ment,a loosecoalition of activistgroups that had been working on a varietyof frontsto transformthe structureof broadcastregulation and challengethe powerof thebig three networks since the mid-1960s. Even federal regulators hadseized upon new technologies and open market rhetoric in orderto address the networkproblem. "Nobody was going to subjectTed Tumer to intense scrutinyif he bashedthe networks,"recalls Harry Shooshan of the Commun- icationsSubcommittee. "He wasmaking the argumentswe wantedto make" [Author'sphone interview with Harry Shooshan, 1994]. But Tumer didn't just mouththe arguments, he embodiedthem - hispersonal success story, his status asa sailinghero, his Southern bravura, his plucky optimism, his cleft chin, his 192 / ERIC GUTHEY

RhettButler mustache, even his fabled womanizing all combinedto makehim the exactlythe rightman at the right time.Although the FCC'sdecision to allow Turner to beam his station'ssignal nationwide to cablesystems via satelliteflew in theface of theprinciple of localism,Turner conveniently spread the veneerof localismover the entiremovement to dismantlethe regulatory protectionof thenetwork broadcasting system. For this very reason,Thomas Streeterwould argue that Tumer's rhetoricwas nothing new, that despite all thegrandstanding it simply brought to the forethe inherent populist, anti-monopoly strain within corporate liberal ideologyand advanced the thoroughlyAmerican and non-controversial values of competitionover and against monopoly. Of cablederegulation in general, Streeterstates, "The result was not a radicalchange in industrystructure toward entrepreneurialismbut rathera seriesof incrementaladjustments within the existingoligopolistic, center-periphery, advertising-supported system of dec- tronicmedia" [Streeter, 1996, p. 175].It's true that on their own, arguments againstcentralization on behalfof competitiondon't present a radicalchallenge to the corporateliberal edifice, and that Tumer'sefforts, rhetorical and other- wise,didn't amount to a revolution.He hasalways been essentially a recycler of old networkfare, of Hollywoodmovies, of live newsfeed throughouta 24-hourperiod - he is an exploiterof copyrightsalong new lines of distribu- tion.As theTime-Warner deal amply illustrates, his primary structural impact within the mediaindustry has been to readjustthe landscapeof center- peripheryrelations and to allow for a new calibrationof the sometimes competing,sometimes complementary forces of expansionand stability at the heartof capitalistenterprise. But Streeterargues that corporate liberal broadcasting hinged on a faith in rationalizationand expertise, and on a particularconception of the public interest. Tumer's aw-shucks,little-guy, anybody-can-figure-this-stuff-out mystiquesets itself in directopposition to thesefirst two imperatives, and his open-marketrhetoric substantially transforms the third.As Streeterexplains, theold notion of thepublic interest undergirding broadcast regulation had two parts.One stemmed from the Fordist ideal of a smoothlyfunctioning capitalist socialsystem, which, in Streeter'swords, combined "a particularvision of the publicas a socialforce in needof harmoniousintegration into the larger politicaleconomy, and the belief that the consumer system would facilitate that integration"[Streeter, 1996, p. 45]. Conceivedin the limitedterms of higher wagesand shorter hours, the public's interest coincided with capital's,because it would greasethe wheelsof massconsumption. In this sensereliable televisionservice fueled by andfueling more advertising and consumption did indeedserve the public's "needs." Ted Turnercertainly shares this emphasis on the virtuesof promoting consumption,and on thecrucial role of themedia in implementingthat vision. In fact,he recaststhe issueon a globalscale. In a 1989interview he saidhe wouldlike to rememberedmost for world peace, and explained: TED TURNER'S MEDIA LEGEND / 193

Man needsto makepeace both with himselfand with the other inhabitantsof this planet.It's a matterof survival,No. 1, and No. 2, it's a matterof goodbusiness. You can'tsell Coca-Cola or moviesto somebodywho's got no moneyat all. If we havea systemwhere everybody had somedisposable income and has their basic needs met, I think it would be a much more prosperousand peaceful world [Dawson, 1989, p. 52]. But the notionof the publicinterest in broadcastingalso had rested on traditionalliberal notions of the citizen'snatural right to propertyand of the natureof citizenshipitself- theairwaves belonged to thecitizens of theUnited States,and anyonewho wishedto exploitthem for commercialgain had to operateas a publictrustee of thatprecious national resource. Tumer came to standfor the argumentthat cableand satellite technology had so greatlyex- pandedthe market that the notion of thepublic trusteeship of a limitednatural resourcesimply didn't apply anymore. In effect,this divested the publicof its ownershipof theairwaves and relegated the public stake in broadcastingpurely to that of a consumer.At the sametime Tumer, the consummatelittle-guy outsider,would own a portionof the mediasystem vicariously for the newly disenfranchisedAmerican people. The powerhe gainedwould accrue symbol- icallyto the people,and this along with a heightenedemphasis on consumer sovereigntywould solve the problemof the corporatecontrol over the media. As a symbolicstand-in for the consumer,then, Tumer doesn'tlegitimize corporatemedia management in the top-down, patemalisfic mode of a Thomas Edison,a DavidSamoff, or a WilliamPaley. No matterhow gray-haired Tumer gets,he maintainsa youthful,rebellious, almost child-like aura of naiYet•and acquisitiveness."Ted Tumer represents the rogue pioneer hormone lost some- wheredeep within the gentrifled,cable-connected, microwavable American soul,"American Film declared in 1989in the hyperbolicprose-style most often usedto describeTurner. "He is oursurrogate venturer into the future, going boldlywhere no man has had the gall to gobefore" [Dawson, 1989, p. 36]. So Turnerfundamentally alters the corporateliberal solution to the problemof thecorporation, supplanting bureaucratic principles with consumer sovereignty,the publictrustee concept with the beneficenceof marketforces, and the promiseof patemalisficcorporate management with the vicarious virtuesof youthfuland regenerative entrepreneurship. Rather than challenge corporatecontrol of media,he legifimizesit on new terms.He doesso by personifyingthe corporatein lessthreatening, anti-bureaucratic ways, and by enactingin hisown person the symbolic insertion of entrepreneurialprinciples of individualagency, innovation, and chaos into the bureaucratic organization itself."A lot of peopleexpected Mr. Tumerwould ride off intothe sunset after he soldhis Tumer Broadcasting System Inc. to TimeWarner," stated an article in TheW/all Street Journal in Marchof 1997."Instead, he is off on a wild ride throughthe world'sbiggest media empire, crashing into top executives' personalfiefdoms, abruptly canceling deals, asking impertinent questions about lavishexpenses, and generally giving Time Wamer a one-mandose of culture 194 / ERIC GUTHEY

shock"[Shapiro, 1997]. Viewed in thislight, the Time-Warnerdeal doesn't contradictTumer's legacy, as Dick Williamsfears. Rather it fulfillshis destiny. Turner'smost significant achievement is not the creationof a few new cable channels,nor the innovationof a wayto explokexisting broadcast properties over new lines of distribution,because on the basis of those achievements alonehis significancehas been vastly oversold. He is mostimportant for the hydeitself, for the way he hascome to serveas a popularicon for the shift towardswhat we mightcall corporate neo-liberalism.

ShiftingMarket Realitiesand the CulturalDiscourse of Enterprise

Onemore look at theTurner legend can help to locatethis shift in more precisehistorical terms. In a fit of combinedgreat-manism and technological determinism,the Time"Man of theYear" piece celebrates the visionary Turner for shrinkingtime and spaceto a vanishingpoint and unitingthe world throughtelecommunications. Again, it's tempting simply to dismisssuch hyper- bole, and to constructa muchmore convincingexplanation for theseshifts with referenceto the cyclesof the marketplace.Such an explanationwould proceedalong the lines laid down by geographer David Harvey: the very notion of thecirculation of capitalconnotes both spatial and temporal movement, and thebest way to accrueprofit under capitalism is to causegoods to movemore andmore quickly along ever more expanding lines of distribution.Although durablegoods can only move and turn over so quickly, services and ephemeral commodities(such as televisionimages) can be distributedaround the world and consumedinstantaneously. In other words, the riseof the serviceecon- omy, and shiftstowards more flexibleand globalstrategies of finance, production,distribution, marketing and market differentiation,corporate organization,and labor destabilization all developin tandemwith the needto circulatecapital at everincreasing rates in orderto accelerategrowth and defer the threatof over-accumulation.This ephemerality and volatility in theglobal circulationof capitalcontributes directly to the culturalexperience of space- timecompression Time attributes to TedTurner [Harvey, 1989]. Of courseit won'tdo to arguethat Ted Turner single-handedly caused the shift from Fordismto a new globalregime of capitalistorganization. Neitherwill the stmcturalistconclusion that "capital really did it all" helpto explainTed Turner. But it is fascinatingto notethat the language Time uses to describeTed Turner and his behavior just as readily describes the behavior of capitaland the new paradigmsof corporateorganization that havebeen associatedwith neo-Fordism. Moreover, if we acceptthe notion that corporate liberalismaccompanied the shift from proprietary-competitivecapkalism to corporate-administrativecapitalism, then it makessense that anothershift in the fabric of capkalistorganization would come accompaniedby a transformationin corporatevalues and ideology as well. Critical discussions of this shiftgo a longway towardpinpointing the significanceof Ted Tumer's mediaimage. For example,Harvey has connected the widespreadresurgence since1970 of competitiveindividualism and entrepreneurial values directly to TED TURNER'S MEDIA LEGEND / 195

transformationsin the behaviorof capital."While the rootsof thistransition are evidenfiydeep and complicated,their consistencywith a transitionfrom Fordismto flexibleaccumulation is reasonablyclear even if the direction(if any)of causalityis not,"he says,because "the more flexible motion of capital emphasizesthe new, the fleeting,the ephemeral,the fugitive, and the contingentin modernlife, ratherthan the moresolid values implanted under Fordism"[Harvey, 1989, p. 171]. In a similarvein, Paul Du Gay andGraeme Salaman have discussed the insertionof entrepreneurialprinciples into the œtrrnand managerial attempts to make organizationsmore "market-driven"and "customer-led"as part and parcelof the neo-Fordist"discourse of enterprise."Such discourse, they argue, diametricallyopposes traditional, ChandlerJan tenets about the managerial virtuesof bureaucraticorganization, turning the corporate liberal modus operandi on its head."Thus, in a curiousinversion of what was for manyyears the receivedwisdom, that the inadequacies of the market should be amelioratedby the bureaucraticmethod of controllingtransactions," they observe,"market coordinationis imposedon administrativecoordination" [Du Gay and Salaman,1992, p. 619].In the wave of "excellence"literature, in the various formsof "totalquality management," and in theimplementation of just-in-time systems,the authorspoint out, managersare encouragedto "reimagine"the entireœtrrn as a setof interactionsbetween customers and suppliers, and even workersare pressed to treateach other as customers: Centralto thesequality-focused strategies is an explicitemphasis on thecustomer, and on establishinga close and direct relation- shipbetween organization and customer, and between elements of the organizationas if thesewere customer/supplier relations. The valueplaced on the customerin currentprogrammes of organizationalchange represents an attemptto recreatewithin the organizationtypes of rehtionshipwhich normally occur on theinterface of theorganization with its customers [Du Gayand Salaman,1992, p. 618]. Alongwith Harvey,Du Gayand Salaman also remark that thiskind of discoursehas spreadout from the ftrrn to the point where all social relationshipsthreaten to becomerelationships between customers and suppliers- hospitals,governments, museums, libraries, schools, even churches, parents,and marriage partners are encouraged to become more "enterprising" and to attendto the needsof their"customers." In this regardenterprise discoursebuilds on the liberalfaith in the marketas a sphereof liberty,but pushesthat faith to suchan extremethat it fundamentallyalters the liberal conceptionof therelationship between the individual and society. "As the lan- guageof the marketbecomes the onlyvalid vocabulary of moraland social calculation,"Du Gay andGraeme explain, "civic culture" gradually becomes "consumerculture," with citizensreconceptualized asenterprising "sovereign consumers"[1992, p. 622]. But while enterpriseculture elevates consumer sovereignty,it really crowns the entrepreneurking, because empowered con- 196 / ERIC GUTHEY sumersare themselvesrecast as entrepreneurs."The enterprisingcustomer- consumeris imaginedas an empoweredhuman being - themoral centre of the enterprisinguniverse," explain Du Gayand Salaman. "Within the discourseof enterprisecustomers/consumers areconstituted as autonomous, self-regulating andself-actualizing individual actors, seeking to maximizethe worthof their existenceto themselvesthrough personalized acts of choicein a world of goodsahd sexyices" [1992, p. 623]. For thisnew entrepreneurial self, the corporation no longerrepresents a form of bureaucraticconstraint on individualfreedom, but ratherthe solearena for the exerciseof autonomyand the achievementof self-realization.As Du Gay and Salamanput it, "Throughthe discourseof enterprise,the relations between'production' and 'consumption',between the 'inside'and 'outside'of the corporation,and crucially between work and non-work based identities, are progressivelyblurred" [Du Gayand Salaman, 1992, p. 627].No longerdoes the unfetteredliberal subject come to the marketto act out his or her freedom, becausein the discourseof enterprisethe individualagent cannot exist apart from the marketin the first place.The centralliberal conflict between in- dividualliberty and societalconstraint is resolvedby the conrationof the economic,the psychological, and the social. In TheInvented Se•, a studyof themany biographical legends surrounding ThomasEdison, David Nye observesthat one of the centralfunctions of biographyis to "assuremodern people of the solidityof theindividual and of the individual'sunproblematic relation to an orderlyflow of events."By delvinginto a privatelife as a modusoperandi for explaining public reality, Nye explains,biography reaffirms that the forcesof modernizationwill not divide anddisenfranchise theself-determining agent, understood as an integrated and coherentpersonality across both public and private realms. But in the very processof performingtheir affirmative function, traditional biographies pred- icatedon personalityimplicitly perpetuate the public/privatesplit and even- tuallyforce us to choosebetween structure and agency [Nye, 1983, pp. 17, 187]. Ted Turneroffers a wayaround this problem because his behavioris virtuallyindistinguishable from the behavior of themarket itself. Born in 1938, thesame year his father formed the Turner Advertising Company, Ted Turner is the TurnerBroadcasting System - evennow that he hassold the family business,he personifiesthe disruptiveand engergizingpresence of Turner Broadcastingwithin Time-Warner. Before the popular press ever knew about Turner'smanic-depressive condition, it celebrated his manic/creative impulses alongsidehis depressive/destructive tendencies in language that also captures thecreative destruction at the heart of capitalistinnovation. Tumer's career has beenmarked by the increasingmobility and velocity of capital- billboards soughtto capturewhat the Outdoor Advertising Association of Americacalled "Marketsin Motion" [Gudis,1996]; the move into televisionfreed Turner Advertisingfrom its billboardmoorings and allowed it to circulateimages at exponentiallygreater speeds; depreciation accounting kept revenues from both billboardsand television in constantcirculation; globalization allowed ethereal commoditiesand capital itself to traveleven greater distances in theblink of an TED TURNER'S MEDIA LEGEND / 197

eye,accelerating commodification on a worldwidebasis. From thisperspective Turner'sCNN constitutesboth an informationservice and a logicalstep in the evolutionof the efficientcapitalist machine, converting the raw materialof currentevents into a commodityto be distributedaround the globeinstant- aneously.CNN's habit of recyclingparticularly gripping video images even allowsit to convertevents ranging from the daily tragedy in Sarajevoto theOJ. trial into instantadvertising for itself."Where were you when the bloodshed began?"asks one such promotional spot alongside images of warfarein Iraq, Bosnia,and Chechnya. "...Where will you be when history happens next?" As an icon of the new enterpriseculture, Ted Turner collapsesthe globaland the self-promotional,the socialand the individual,the corporateand thepersonal, and calls for an approachthat replaces the organizing principle of personalitywith an emphasis on capital.That is to say,Turner is sucha creature of the marketthat his biographycan alsobe the biographyof the new ways capitalhas come to behaveduring a specifichistorical period. Such a biography would not concernitself with Tumer'spersonality as somesort of interior forcethat hasshaped external reality. It alsowould have to rejectthe notion thatcapital is simplya "thingout there"that determines thoughts, actions or behaviorin any mechanisticfashion. Instead it would adhereto Raymond Williams'cultural materialist understanding of capital as dynamicprocess, humanactivity, and mode of socialorganization [Williams, 1977, p. 75-82].As David Harveyputs it: Capitalis a processand not a thing... Its internalizedhales of operationare suchas to ensurethat it is a dynamicand revolu- tionarymode of socialorganization, resalessly and ceaselessly transformingthe societywithin which it is embedded.The processmasks and fetishizes,achieves growth through creative destruction,creates new wants and needs, transforms spaces, and speedsup thepace of life [Harvey,1989, p. 343]. A Turnerbiography predicated on sucha conceptionof capitalwould focusprimarily on the waysthat Turner'sactivities - alongwith the endless tellingand retellingof the legendarystory of thoseactivities over the years- form part of a broaderset of humanactivities that haveas theirend result the reproductionof the capitalistsocial order in newways for a newhistorical mo- ment.This is not to saythat Ted Turner'spersonality is not importantor interesting,but ratherthat exacdywhat is importantand interesting about his personalityis the way that it intersectswith and standsfor new formsof capitalistand corporate organization and legitimation. In thissense, precisely becauseof his dynamicand aggressive personality and what it hascome to symbolize,Ted Turner provides an opportunityto examinethe personification of the corporationand of corporateagency during a watershedperiod of change,and challengesthe biographerand historianto developa language sufficiendynuanced to talk aboutthe pointwhere agency and structuremeet withoutreifymg either side of thatdivide. 198 / ERIC GUTHEY

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