Word: viacom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Redstone, 81, was quick to promote to co-president both Freston, 58, and Leslie Moonves, 54, who ran CBS, filling the vacancy left by Karmazin, 60. Redstone said he would finally call it quits within three years, setting up a horse race for the top job at Viacom, a la GE after Jack Welch retired in 2001. Critical to Redstone, Freston and Moonves are dyed-in-the-wool content guys. Freston, a free-spirited music lover who has served on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, engineered the phenomenal success of MTV. Moonves, a hard-charging...
This wasn't the only time Redstone took the lead in orchestrating a shift toward bigger risks on the content side of Viacom's media empire. At a meeting this year with executives at Viacom's Paramount Pictures, with Karmazin present, Redstone stunned his team with a commitment to bankroll more of the big-budget films that studio heads love but that Karmazin loved to avoid. The divide over how far to wade into expensive movies and risky programming was not gaping. Karmazin says he was eager, for example, to launch the gay network. But things weren't moving fast...
Reports of sniping between Karmazin and Redstone began surfacing almost immediately after the media titans joined forces with the merger of CBS and Viacom in 2000. Even Karmazin's new contract, signed just last year, didn't put an end to constant rumors of feuding. But in contrast to Redstone's creative leanings, Karmazin's focus was on running a lean operation, and by last month Karmazin had evidently tired of Redstone's upstaging him. Karmazin denies any material conflicts and says he resigned because "there was too much about Mel and Sumner, and I didn't think it would...
...blow it once would have been. One analyst rushed out a report titled "Mel Who?", and the stock barely budged. Just a few years ago, Karmazin was a Wall Street darling, highly prized as a tough, budget-minded operator who could make the free-spending creative forces at Viacom toe the line. But his star faded as Viacom consistently fell short of financial targets...
...Heir Cut Viacom's No. 2 is out, as Sumner Redstone reasserts his power...