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Ted Turner's Media Legend and the Transformation of Corporate 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 the suitsat 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 Societyof 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 actionson 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 eraof 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'sf•rst broadcast superstation; mounting CNN; acquiringa majorHollywood ffirn library and spinning off severalnew successfulcable channels; and finallylaunching himself into the orbit of the reallybig boyswith the Time-Warnerdeal. 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-depressiveson 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 at oneand
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