NOW IT’S A TED TURNER LAND GRAB! Jack Shafer, as noted below, has pointed out a land grab by The New York Times. Last night on the local news (I’m on Hilton Head, but I’m not sure if the station was out of Savannah or Charleston), I learned that the media-baron land grabbery is even more widespread than I thought: Ted Turner is apparently trying to snatch a swath of land on nearby St. Helena island from a bunch of Gullah descendants. A little poking around found this story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from yesterday, though it’s rather more sympathetic to Turner than the local news treatment was.
Ted Turner: driving the descendants of slaves off their land in pursuit of wicked development plans! I can only imagine the stink that would be made if a crony of George Bush’s were doing this. But as it’s a Duke of Big Media, we probably won’t hear much more.
UPDATE: Eric Alterman doesn’t address Ted Turner’s behavior, but he does have more today on the New York Times issue.