The Clash of the Titans: How the Unbridled Ambition of Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch Has Created Global Empires That Control What We Read and W [Paperback]

What do Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch want out of life? Apart from the usual pleasures--love, fortune, good health--they apparently want to control the world's media. And, to judge by this account, each wants the other's head on a platter.

"In another time, they might have dueled on a grassy plain with muskets, or faced each other at high noon at opposite ends of a dusty street, holsters slung low on their hips," writes media/entertainment pundit Hack. Turner and Murdoch have chosen to fight it out, with undisguised venom, in a singularly public venue--Turner through CNN and other networks, Murdoch through Sky and Fox TV, plus a host of magazines and newspapers. Turner espouses liberal views while Murdoch is a hard-line conservative, but both are supreme "controllers of information" and "manipulators of public opinion," according to Hack. Their fight has cost billions of dollars, and it's wounded more than a few bystanders. It has also, as Hack rightly notes, set the tone for the contemporary press, for the worse, sacrificing journalistic integrity in the interest of two "competing political agendas ... until there is one."

Balanced, for the most part, if only because Hack seems to have little affection for either of his subjects, Clash of the Titans is a readable account of a private war between prideful tycoons with long memories. Media buffs will find much of interest in this portrait of "colliding storm fronts," both of whose reach extends far and wide. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

If information is power, then whoever controls it holds the world in his palm. In this terrific dual biography, Hack's follow-up to his bestselling Hughes, Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner are the titans who clash over global dominance of information's flow. Hack begins in 1996, with a rift between Murdoch and Jerry Levin of Time Warner, which had recently absorbed Turner Broadcasting, over Time Warner's refusal to carry Murdoch's Fox News Channel in addition to Turner's CNN. The refusal leads to a barrage of "back stabbing and name-calling" between Turner, now Time Warner's largest stockholder, and Murdoch that highlights the bitter enmity between the two men. The chapter spotlights all the virtues that make Hack's work a model of entertaining business writing: his ability to dramatize financial dealings whileproviding hard facts and figures; his keen understanding of the psychology of those of towering ambition; his easily read and clever prose ("Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch are two storm fronts colliding.... Turner-the high front that swings erratic.... Murdoch-the low front that appears at rest, then moves with amazing speed, absorbing all in his path"). The remainder of the book flows chronologically, following Turner and Murdoch as they established their empires in the 1980s, Turner primarily via cable, Murdoch mainly via newspapers and then satellite TV; as their personal lives took surprising turns, with Turner the rake settling down with Jane Fonda while Murdoch the family man ditches his longtime wife for a much younger woman; and as they crusade for opposing political beliefs, Turner the liberal environmentalist, Murdoch the arch-conservative. Hack's vision of megabusinesses as a reflection of the personalities of those who run them is gripping and exceptionally vivid, and if he occasionally veers into melodrama ("They will clash and they will win, with the power to determine what is seen, how it is received... "), he has produced here, as he did in Hughes, a sparkling, immensely enjoyable portrait of extraordinary men. First serial to Variety.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.