Media Man Ted Turner's Improbable Empire

Wildly outspoken and ferociously competitive, Ted Turner is not your typical CEO. Equal parts mogul and visionary, Turner turned a modest suite of businesses into an improbable media empire that was in the forefront of the cable-television revolution. Inheriting a regional outdoor-advertising company when his overwrought father committed suicide, Turner, still in his twenties, quickly moved into broadcasting, first with radio stations, then with a UHF television channel in Atlanta. Within a decade, Turner had made his local television station into a cable channel seen across the country. He bought sports teams and film libraries to provide programming. He bet the company twice, gambling it all on building the first twenty-four-hour news network, CNN, and then on buying MGM's film library to start new cable channels. In between, he captained Courageous to victory in the America's Cup, while making headlines for his "Captain Outrageous" antics and his habit of stirring controversy. By the 1990s, despite the growth of his empire to the point where he could mount an effort to acquire CBS, Turner realized that his company's future lay in merging with a larger company. Time Warner assimilated Turner Broadcasting, but not Turner, whose buccaneering ways were never a good fit with a large, button-downed corporation. Time Warner's eventual merger with AOL would prove disastrous for Turner, depriving him of real power and turning what should have been his crowning achievement into a morass of infighting and recrimination. Turner is now something of a lion in winter but, given his improbable career, he is always a factor. Granted unique access to Turner and other key insiders (Gerald Levin, Steve Case, and Dick Parsons among them), Ken Auletta, America's foremost media reporter, tells the story of Turner the entrepreneur with rare authority. Media Man is a brisk and engrossing view of an unorthodox innovator, a pioneering company, and the industry they created.Auletta, Ken is the author of 'Media Man Ted Turner's Improbable Empire', published 2004 under ISBN 9780393051681 and ISBN 0393051684.