I decided to post this article on this thread because it concerns a competitor of CNBC.
Personally, I think Turner was an embarrassment to Levin, and that was the reason he was fired.
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUNDAY APRIL 15, 2001 10:15:08 ET XXXXX
TED TURNER CONSIDERED SUICIDE AFTER FONDA BREAKUP, CNN FIRING; SAYS AOLTIMEWARNER'S GERRY LEVIN DID 'MARGINAL JOB RUNNING COMPANY'
CNN founder Ted Turner unloads in an upcoming issue of the NEW YORKER: "I felt like Job," Turner tells Ken Auletta, adding that he also sometimes felt "suicidal" last year, after he lost his job and his wife, and faced a series of daunting problems involving his family and his health.
"Most adults have the support of a spouse and family, friends, and a job," Auletta writes in "The Lost Tycoon", hitting racks Monday, "Turner didn't have a spouse, had never had intimate friends, and no longer ran his own company."
MORE
At the beginning of 2000, when the AOLTIMEWARNER merger was announced, Turner "seemed invincible," Auletta writes. And yet, a year later, "in the new world of AOLTIMEWARNER it is probably not premature to write Ted Turner's business obituary."
Auletta's frank conversations with Turner, his ex-wife Jane Fonda, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Levin, Kofi Annan, and many of Turner's longtime associates provide a fresh look at Turner's long, provocative winding-road career. Turner tells Auletta that he was "a rabbit that's small and fast. All my big competitors were like a pack of wolves, and they were all chasing me, but I was fast enough to be out in front of them."
SHUT OUT: FIRED WITH A PHONE CALL
Auletta reports that Turner was not invited to participate in the talks about how the merged AOLTIMEWARNER would operate. Last May, Turner says, he was fired. He tells Auletta that this news was delivered during a phone call with Gerald Levin, the C.E.O. of TIMEWARNER, who told him that the company was going to reorganize: Turner Broadcasting would no longer report to Turner but to AOL executive Robert Pittman.
According to Turner, Levin also said, "Sorry, Ted, but you lose your vice-chairman title as well."
LEVIN DID 'MARGINAL JOB' Turner also says that Levin, as chief executive, wanted "to keep everybody weak, so he could be stronger" and "the TIMEWARNER divisions did not cooperate the way they should have... I think he did a pretty marginal job of running the company."
For his part, Levin says, "I didn't fire Ted. I said, 'This is the way we need to run the company.'"
Levin also tells Auletta, "Ted is by far the most interesting person I've ever met... how he reacts to things. It's as if a child were speaking, without any social inhibitions. You don't say in business, 'I got fired.' He'll just speak out loud what may be going through someone's mind, and he'll say it to everybody. I think that's a beautiful characteristic. He's angelic. The whole world is socially constrained. I love and respect this about Ted, but for other people it may be very difficult."
NOT BEING TREATED WITH RESPECT
Lou Dobbs, who recently returned to CNN after a two-year absence, says that Turner "has not been treated with the respect due him."
Jane Fonda concurs.
"The way it was handled was really shocking," she says. "It makes me mad. How dare they give him a phone call!"
Turner also criticizes the merged company, of which he is the largest individual shareholder, and says that he may leave it. At AOLTIMEWARNER, according to Turner, the drive to double operating profits from Turner Broadcasting will affect CNN and its other units. Of the recent changes in the roles of his two longtime deputies, Turner says, "They were unhappy mainly that the financial goals they were given were unachievable without really hurting the company."
PLANS TO COMPETE WITH CNN
"I never ran the company by the numbers,? Turner says. Turner is so upset with the removal of documentaries from CNN's schedule that he is developing a number of projects that will compete with CNN. His foundation is planning to join with PBS and Bill Moyers to produce up to a hundred hours of documentaries on world issues which would be broadcast on public television over the next few years.
FONDA: I GREW UP
Auletta talks to Fonda about the end of their marriage.
"My becoming a Christian upset him very much... for good reason. He's my husband and I chose not to discuss it with him, because he would have talked me out of it. He's a debating champion. He saw it as writing on the wall. He knew my daughter was having a baby and it would take me away from him. He needs someone to be there one hundred per cent of the time. He thinks that's love. It is not love. It's babysitting. I didn't want to tell you this. We went in different directions. I grew up."
Turner describes his reaction to Fonda's religious turn this way.
"I had absolutely no warning about it. She didn't tell me she was thinking about doing it. She just came home and said, 'I've become a Christian.' Before that, she was not a religious person. That's a pretty big change for your wife of many years to tell you. That's a shock. . . .Obviously, we weren't communicating very well at that time."
JESUS WAS OTHER MAN
Turner's eldest daughter, Laura, doesn't think religion as such was the real problem. "It was another male," she says, meaning Jesus. "It took time away from him."
Fonda says that Turner is insecure and that "He loves GONE WITH THE WIND for lots of reasons, and one of them is that he identifies with Scarlett O'Hara."
Turner's father, Ed, was an important inspiration to him, but Ed also beat him, sometimes with a wire coat hanger, and even made Turner give him a beating. "It was the most painful thing I ever did in my entire life," Turner says, but he credits his father for understanding "that would be a more effective punishment than him beating me."
Turner says that despite everything, he lost his "best friend" when his father killed himself in 1963, at 53.
"Why this guy didn't go under psychologically at age five, I don't know," Fonda says. "It scarred him for life. It colors everything, his relationships, his anxieties..."
'SEVERELY, HAUNTINGLY TRAUMATIZED'
Fonda suggests that Turner's restlessness and insecurity drove his career. "I say this with all the love in the world... He has been severely, hauntingly traumatized. He always thinks something is about to be pulled out from him. He has no belief in permanency and stability. It's one reason why I'm not with him. Older age is about slowing down and growing vertically, not horizontally. That's not Ted."
Asked for an explanation of his sometimes winning, sometimes insulting off-the-cuff-remarks, Turner tells Auletta that he feels like Zorba the Greek: "I lose my self-restraint and just get up and dance sometimes."
Looking back over his career, Turner says, he is happy that he was able to build Turner Broadcasting "right under the networks' noses."
"They laughed at me when I started with CBS," he says, referring to his attempt to buy the network in 1985. "They laughed at me when I started CNN. They laughed at me when I bought M-G-M. I spent a lot of time thinking, and I did not fear, because of my classical background. When Alexander the Great took control when his dad died, he was twenty years old. . . .He kept marching. He hardly ever stopped. And he never lost a battle." |
