Ted Turner, speaking about renewable energy at the Milken Institute Global Conference, dipped into media history to call former Time Warner executives "dumb" for business missteps such as selling a stake in Google too soon, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
One of his targets was former Time Warner Chief Executive Dick Parsons, who wanted to sell the company’s stake in Google.
"We had 5 percent of Google in a music merger and I said to Dick Parsons, ‘Dick, I think we ought to hang onto that Google stock.’ That was 10 years ago. He said, ‘That company is a bunch of bullshit’," Turner said.
Turner, sometimes called "The Mouth of the South," also complained about Time Warner’s decision to shut down CNNfn without trying to first sell it to Rupert Murdoch.
"We had CNNfn, which was in 50 million homes, as Fox is in now. And they made the decision to close it down. It was breaking even. We should have been in there competing with CNBC and Bloomberg. They closed it down without even calling Rupert up, who said publicly he was looking really hard at getting into the financial news business. We could have gotten $100 million or $200 million from him just for the name and the 50 million subscribers." Turner concluded by asking, "How dumb can you be?"
A good place to start looking for an answer to Ted’s seemingly rhetorical question (How dumb can you be?) might be found by asking who are the people in charge and responsible for running CNN into the ratings and credibility ditch.
Although founder Ted is out of the CNN picture these days, a “pre-mortem” on his 24/7 news baby would seem to be a more appropriate and interesting target for his unhinged jaw and flapping tongue.
The people that are in charge of CNN are so far removed from what is going on, because if the did have hands-on maybe CNN would not be in the slumps that it is today.
CNN-fn was their biggest blunder in TV history.