On Neil Cavuto‘s FBN show, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin talked about his bid for CNN when he ran CBS.
“One of the things I tried to do is to take the CBS News organization, which is a great news organization and a very expensive operation and tried to combine that with CNN where we would have a 24-hour news channel.
The first person I tried to do that transaction with was Ted Turner. I subsequently tried to do it with Gerry Levin. I subsequently tried to do it with Parsons. All of them felt, at that time, that they did not want to sell CNN.”
Advertisement“If I were Disney or CBS and I didn’t have a cable network and I had a news organization, how could I not be thinking about the benefits that could be accrued for shareholders by combining CNN with one of those news organizations?”