Word: warners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cable deals close. He has promised to sell off assets and restructure the company, but investors are waiting impatiently. At the same time, he must still mediate between squabbling factions in a company with two distinct corporate cultures that were mingled but never quite merged when Time Inc. acquired Warner Communications...
...flap over rap is not making life any easier for him. A cerebral, low-key chief executive, Levin has consistently defended the company's raunchy rap music on the grounds of freedom of expression. In 1992, when Time Warner was under fire for releasing Ice-T's violent rap song Cop Killer, Levin described rap as a legitimate expression of street culture, which deserves an outlet. "The test of any democratic society," he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column, "lies not in how well it can control expression but in whether it gives freedom of thought...
...member Time Warner board is generally supportive of Levin and his corporate strategy. But insiders say several of them -- notably Luce, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills and former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent -- have echoed Bennett's concerns in conversations with Levin. "Some of us have known for many, many years that the freedoms under the First Amendment are not totally unlimited," says Luce. "I think it is perhaps the case that some people associated with the company have belatedly come to realize this...
...figure in the debate is Richard Parsons, the former chairman of Dime Bank Corp. who was named to the No. 2 position of Time Warner president last October. Parsons, an African-American and a Republican, is reportedly trying to persuade Levin to make some accommodation that would defuse the issue. But company insiders say a more important move may have been the replacement in May of Warner Music chief Robert Morgado with Michael Fuchs, Levin's longtime colleague at HBO. Company sources say Fuchs' appointment was at least partly motivated by Levin's perception that Warner's fiercely independent music...
Meanwhile, company sources happily volunteer the information that rap music represents only a small slice of Time Warner's total revenues: $85 million last year, about 2% of the $4 billion that the music division generates and an even tinier fraction of Time Warner's $15.9 billion in annual revenues. Translation: if the company were forced to scale back on rap, the bottom-line impact would be minimal...