-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Turner forced out of CNN by money men Edward Helmore Sunday April 8, 2001 The Observer Ted Turner, the most voluble and compelling media titan of his time, now cuts a ghostly figure. In the last month, the billionaire founder of CNN, erstwhile husband of Jane Fonda, the largest private landowner in the US, environmental campaigner, United Nations benefactor, yachtsman, and irrepressible loud mouth, has been cut adrift from the US media empire he created by rivals with no tolerance for an outspoken individualist. Three years ago, Turner sold TBS, the cable TV network he founded, to Time Warner, which was itself purchased by America Online last year. He was expected to run his share of the empire for five years, but was suddenly replaced in a boardroom coup by a younger man, James Kellner, in February. 'I've already been fired,' he said last week. He has seen CNN upstaged by younger rivals such as Rupert Murdoch's Fox and gutted of staff and correspondents by the new management. And one of his first profitable channels, the professional wrestling station WCW, has been shut down and sold to its main competitor. The 62-year-old 'Mouth from the South' may still have plans - last week he bought a 20 per cent stake in NTV, the troubled independent Russian TV company, hoping that he can rescue it from looming state control - and he still officially holds the title of vice-chairman at AOL Time Warner, the world's largest media company, but his is a dwindling role. He is no longer listed as owner of the Atlanta Braves, and team's stadium - Turner Field - may now be renamed AOL Field. According to former employees in Atlanta, the biggest symbolic blow came when AOL closed the Turner Environmental Division, which produced environmental documentaries for CNN. 'Hell, I said they should put a banner ad on my tombstone. It should read "Here lies Ted Turner, sponsored by Coca-Cola". We could get $25,000 for that. It would help them make their numbers,' he told the Washington Post. 'I'm in spiritual and mental pain. When you've worked to build a company for 40 years and you know all the people there, and one day it's gone, well, that's a hard transition for anyone. It's like taking your pencil away and telling you you can't write anymore.' But Turner is hardly ready to disappear. In recent weeks, he's hit the university lecture circuit doing what he does best - leading with his mouth, stirrings things up and voicing his reliably contentious opinions on topics such as nuclear weapons, global warming and other environmental issues. For the first time in his career, Turner has nothing to run. The TV networks he nurtured through several brushes with bankruptcy are beset with ratings declines and he worries that the new management at CNN is concerned less with the news than with meeting bottomline targets. 'When we got into covering Kosovo and Baghdad, I would just tell them, "If we bust the budget, we bust the budget". We put journalism first,' he says. 'They say they're doing that, but when these companies get so big, they get under pressure to run it by the numbers.' Though Turner is AOL Time Warner's biggest shareholder, holding stock valued at $6 billion, he has clearly been outmanouvered by AOL chief Steve Case, says Reese Schonfeld, who helped found CNN. Turner says his main enthusiasms now are his philanthropic crusades. He contributes to hundreds of causes from the Bat Conservation Society to healthcare for girls in Mali and the campaign to eliminate the last vestiges of polio. Noticing that there were fewer bees polinating the flowers on his Florida plantation, he came up with $500,000 for a project to address the problem. He has acquired vast tracts of land - 1.7 million acres in all - in New Mexico, Montana, Nebraska, Kansas and South Dakota that he says will be preserved in its natural state in perpetuity. He has 25,000 head of bison and has attempted to reintroduce various endangered species, such as black-footed ferrets and desert bighorn sheep. Turner may have a bad case of the billionaire blues and have taken to quoting the soliloquy about mortality and humility from Richard II , but, says Robert Wussler, head of the NTV negotiations: 'Nobody should be in the process of discounting Ted Turner. I don't think he'll ever rest.' *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? 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