An incomplete account of Ted Turner's fall from grace
Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire, Ken Auletta, Atlas Books and W.W. Norton & Co., 205 pp, $22.95.
In April 2001, The New Yorker magazine published a splendid, 20,000-word profile of cable television pioneer Ted Turner. Written by veteran media writer Ken Auletta, it was first-class magazine writing: brimming with insight and crisp verbal snapshots of Turner at perhaps the most poignant moment of his career. Auletta won a National Magazine prize for the story.
Then, like a party on the morning after the prom, came the book.
Auletta's book on Ted Turner: "Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire," is stretched too thin. In the acknowledgements, Auletta says he conducted three additional interviews over lunch with Turner as well as other reporting. It wasn't nearly enough.
Magazine articles inform us. If they're very good, they make us smarter and give us a couple of clever tidbits we can share over dinner or drinks.
But we want books to spirit us away, to envelop us in someone else's life. "Media Man" ticks off the main stops of Turner's journey, like postcards from overseas. But we don't get to go along for the ride.
Auletta treats Turner more gently in his book than in his article. The New Yorker piece opens with a classic tease: "Early last year, Ted Turner seemed invincible. He was the largest shareholder in
By contrast, the book begins more respectfully: "Getting fired came as a shock to Ted Turner." (The rest of the first chapter reprints, almost verbatim, the beginning of the article.)
Although telegraphing events sets a fine rhythm for magazine stories, book readers want more: What did Turner do when he got that gut-churning call from Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin? Did he throw up? Cry? Did he stare into space and wonder why the world had seemingly turned against him? Did he fantasize about running over Levin in a pickup truck?
As the best editors implore every writer: Show me, don't tell me.
Turner began in a billboard business started by his father but longed to vault onto a bigger stage, namely television.
He bought his first Chattanooga radio station in 1968 and soon began buying ailing local television stations.
By the mid-1970s, he allied himself with the emerging cable business to wage war against big broadcast networks.
"Turner was taking a huge business risk," Auletta writes, as the entrepreneur borrowed heavily and sold few ads during his early television years. Auletta summarizes these travails so flatly that we don't feel Turner's pain.
Auletta's finely tuned instincts for the business of media shine when he describes the Time Warner/America Online merger.
Both companies touted the virtues of "synergy" and "convergence," code words for the belief that jamming businesses together can create something more valuable than the sum of the individual parts. Auletta is unsparing. "A sister of synergy, of course, is shilling," he writes.
Auletta's deft deconstruction of the doomed deal isn't surprising; that story has been told many times by now. What's more, Turner was gradually sidelined from the megamerger, explaining why the fizzled strategy sheds little insight into Turner's character.
Turner is a memorable character: wily, charming, insecure, and passionate. As readers, we want to feel this guy -- to ride shotgun in his pickup, to dance cheek-to-cheek with ex-wife Jane Fonda, and to shudder as his once wildly brave and sometimes reckless news organization is trained to carry a corporate saddle. In "Media Man," we must watch from afar.
Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor at Forbes magazine.
