Commentary

Ted Turner, Hitler, Fox News, and Bison

Ted Turner came back to beef up a dull National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) meeting with talk of Hitler, Fox News, soft news, and lean hamburgers -- all to the trade press' delight.

Turner did his usual attacks -- comparing Fox News to Adolph Hitler's propaganda machine of the 1930s, as well as throwing a few barbs at his former company, Time Warner.

The wide-ranging interview, at the NATPE meeting in Las Vegas yesterday, covered Turner's philanthropic activities, environmental issues, a growing liking of Bill Clinton, as well as his involvement in a chain of restaurants serving bison burgers.

Ah, the mouth from the South.

Good for cable. Good for a rising, but still struggling television programming conference. The irony is that it took a legend cable executive to put some snap into a convention that had its roots in syndication -- a long-time competitor of cable.

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This showed how far things had come. Turner alluded to this in his rant against media consolidation -- and then, maybe for it. Turner humbly spoke from both sides of his mouth, not only as an ousted executive of Time Warner, but also as a current member of the board of Time Warner.

"Just about everything resides in the ownership of five [media] companies," he said.

TV news has been getting soft -- as in Hollywood soft, he said. It should become harder. But he warned that the FCC and the federal government are making it difficult for news organizations to do edgy journalism.

It's hard to know what the press thinks of Turner anymore. Obviously he makes for good quote material, but it comes from a man without a portfolio. He's outrageous one minute and provocatively interesting the next.

When asked by some young professionals what kind of business he would start if he started over today, he said he would open a bison burger restaurant. This was no doubt a bulky, hard-to-digest metaphor for the next several years in television.

Few big TV programming operations really take chances on truly original programming ideas, new racy cable channels or experimental media technologies. Corporate bottom lines don't really allow it.

There's a lot of beef and protein on the air these days -- but not much fat, or much fun.

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