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The Dole controversy has opened up other fault lines in the Time Warner empire. As head of HBO, Fuchs was frequently at odds with the top executives at Warner Bros. film division, Robert Daly and Terry Semel. Some speculate that Daly and Semel were not unhappy to see Fuchs -- the one company official assigned to respond publicly to Dole's attack -- aking all the corporate heat. When Robert Friedman, head of advertising and publicity for Warner Bros. films, was asked for a comment on Dole's speech, he interestingly passed the buck. "It's not a movie issue," he said. "It's more a music issue."
Of course it is both, and more. In one sense, Time Warner's role as the pop-culture world's designated lightning rod seems perfectly appropriate. As the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate, the company is big enough to have multiple examples of virtually every product that might give people offense, from cheesy talk shows to loud heavy-metal bands. The fact that it is based in America (unlike many of its giant rivals, like Sony and Bertelsmann) makes it a compelling target. The company may also have presented an inviting bull's-eye for Senator Dole because of its history of supporting Democratic candidates and causes. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Time Warner and its subsidiaries contributed disproportionately more to Democratic than to Republican candidates-though company figures show the discrepancy disappeared in the last congressional campaign.
Some company defenders charge that Dole was unfairly singling out Time Warner for what is a culture-wide problem. For instance, he criticized two Warner movies -- Natural Born Killers (a box-office success) and True Romance (a flop), both based on stories by Quentin Tarantino -- but ignored Tarantino's critically acclaimed but equally violent Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, both released by Miramax, a division of Walt Disney Co. Disney also owns Hollywood Records, whose performers include such controversial rappers as Prince Akeem.
Still, whoever else may be doing it, Time Warner has undeniably made itself a major presence in the outer reaches of hard-edged rap. It may not be the largest distributor of rap music (the German-based Bertelsmann Music Group accounts for an 18.5% share of the rap market, compared with Time Warner's 16.4%), but it is home to several of the biggest and baddest performers, due largely to its ownership stake in Interscope, a small label that releases Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg. (Earlier this year, Time Warner increased its ownership in Interscope from 25% to 50%.) The standards of taste at Warner Music labels, moreover, have at times seemed extraordinarily lax. Several years ago, Geffen Records (then affiliated with Warner Records) rejected a Geto Boys album because of its explicit lyrics about mutilating women and having sex with dead bodies. The album was immediately distributed by another Warner label.