Senator Robert Dole's broadside last week was hardly the first occasion on which Time Warner has found itself the target of a crusade against pop culture. Two weeks earlier, William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education, and C. DeLores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, brought their campaign against offensive rock lyrics to the annual Time Warner shareholders' meeting at New York's City Center. At one point in the meeting, Tucker rose from the audience and delivered a 17-minute attack on violent and misogynistic lyrics in songs recorded by Time Warner performers. At the end of her speech, about a third of the packed audience burst into applause. Among them, notably, was a member of the Time Warner board of directors: Henry Luce III, the son of TIME's founder.
No company likes to be told it is contributing to the moral decline of a nation. "Is this what you intended to accomplish with your careers?" Senator Robert Dole asked Time Warner executives rhetorically last week. "You have sold your souls, but must you debase our nation and threaten our children as well?" At Time Warner, however, such questions are simply the latest manifestation of the soul-searching that has embroiled the company ever since the conglomerate was born in 1990. It's a self-examination that has, at various times, involved issues of social responsibility, creative freedom and the corporate bottom line.
At the vortex of this debate is chairman Gerald Levin, 56, who took over for the late Steve Ross in 1992. On the financial front, Levin is under pressure to boost the sagging stock price and reduce the company's mountainous debt, which will increase to $17.3 billion after two new 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.
The 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 and expression the widest possible latitude, however controversial or exasperating the results may sometimes be ... We won't retreat in the face of threats of boycotts or political grandstanding."