Marriage Yields Media Odd Couple But Deal Sets Stage For Variety Of New Entertainment Ventures

Don’t count on buying a Bernie Shaw action figure at your local Warner Brothers Studio Stores. Still, the media world’s latest megamerger, announced Friday, would in effect wed the CNN anchor with Bugs Bunny.

What else might be affected? Just let your imagination wander. That’s what the bosses of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., the owners of CNN, and Time Warner Inc., which has the rights to the “wascally wabbit,” are doing as they plan for a united future as the world’s foremost media and entertainment company.

So is investment banker Porter Bibb, a former newsman and author of a Ted Turner biography, who cited two of the many changes that might stem from the merger.

“The launch of CNN Financial News, the network kicking off Jan. 1, is going to benefit enormously from the editorial input of Fortune and Money magazines,” Bibb predicted.

Another beneficiary, he said, would be The WB “emerging” network, which could draw on the Turner movie and cartoon library, CNN sports and CNN News.

“Overnight, it can become a full-fledged network,” Bibb said. Which could be bad news for The WB’s rival, UPN.

What else might the future bring? Consider these possibilities:

CNN and Time magazine are expected to share some of their news-gathering resources.

Already CNN airs an annual program pegged to Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” In the future, Time-Life’s stable of magazines could inspire more TV shows for Turner cable networks (“The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Hour” on the SuperStation?) or even trigger their own cable channels (the People Magazine Network?).

After airing on a network, a Warner-produced TV series could move on to a Turner cable channel before heading for local syndication.

And what about book and magazine tie-ins with Turner’s sports franchises?

At Friday’s news conference, the beaming faces of Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin and TBS Chairman Ted Turner made it clear they view the merger as a marriage made in heaven.

Levin hailed Turner, who will join him in the new company as vice chairman, for his skill in “taking wonderful programs and linking them with terrific networks on a worldwide basis.”

But will all this synergistic mixing-and-matching prove beneficial to the public?

“Mergers aren’t made in living rooms, they’re made on Wall Street,” said communications consultant Gene Jankowski, a former CBS network president. “The public doesn’t care who owns the entertainment companies. The quality of the product they turn out is what the public is interested in.”

Often a bigger company can afford to develop more product, he added.

“One reason you see so much (creative) repetition is because the cost of producing ideas continues to escalate,” he said, while larger companies “have deeper pockets to produce ideas, most of which inevitably fail.”

On the other hand, a prominent Hollywood talent agent warned that any company saddled with debt, and the expanded Time Warner will have $19.6 billion in debt, might bail out of anything that isn’t a quick hit.

“A lot of (divisions) that aren’t big profit centers but are creating product, they’re going to drop off the map,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “For example, with a TV show that may not have huge potential in syndication, the studio may say, ‘Just don’t make it.”’

That also alarms Benjamin Barber, a Rutgers University political scientist and critic of media consolidation.

A Time Warner-Turner marriage, he said, “is one more instance of the kind of concentration that in the long run will constrict competition and free expression.”

Barber, author of “Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together,” decried what he sees as a further lack of diversity.

“Once again,” he said, “we see a contraction of media that should be multiplying.”