Ted Turner, from one year ago . . .

Back in the first week of August 2004, the Wall Street Journal was paying attention to Ted Turner’s latest slam against media conglomeration. Turner argued in July/August's Washington Monthly magazine (titled "My Beef With Big Media") that we have to "bust up the big conglomerates. We've done this before: to railroad trusts in the first part of the 20th century, to Ma Bell more recently." Turner continued: "Politically, big media may be on the wrong side of history." Also in May 2004, Turner published an opinion piece in the Washington Post that protested then-current FCC proposals to raise the limit on the number of TV stations in a single market that can be owned by a single corporation. In that article, he was careful to say he was "speaking only for myself, not for AOL Time Warner." The Washington Monthly piece goes further. Media consolidation, he argued this time, was contributing to a reduction in quality, hastening the decline in local news and encouraging the suppression of divergent views. "In the current climate of consolidation, independent broadcasters simply don't survive for long," he wrote. "At this late stage, media companies have grown so large and powerful, and their dominance has become so detrimental to the survival of small, emerging companies, that there remains only one alternative: bust up the big conglomerates."

"Turner founded Turner Broadcasting System in 1970, eventually launching several successful cable networks including TBS, Cartoon Network and CNN. In 1996 he sold the company to Time Warner, becoming the media conglomerate's largest shareholder and joining its board of directors. Now, Time Warner has $40 billion in annual sales. It owns the second biggest collection of cable systems in the U.S., one of the biggest film studios, the biggest magazine publisher as well as several leading cable-TV networks. But Mr. Turner is now suggesting that media companies are too big and should be broken up by the government."