Last week, Christopher Caldwell noted in these pages that Ted Turner's billion-dollar U.N. gift wouldn't be a billion dollars, wouldn't go to the U. N., and was perhaps less a gift than a quid pro quo. This week we're led to surmise something else: It won't go into free-speech programs, either.
CNN, in which Turner still owns a share, has just pulled ads that criticize a proposed U.N. treaty on global warming. Does this have anything to do with Turner's environmentalism and his newly forged U.N. ties? Does it have anything to do with currying favor at this week's confab at the White House on global warming? Or is this just the way the new CNN operates? Certainly Rick Kaplan, new president of Turner's CNN, is hardly a champion of untrammeled expression. At his first staff meeting, he ordered employees to stop using the word "scandal" when referring to the Clinton fund-raising . . . scandals.
Turner whined quite a lot about freedom of expression when he was presiding over the Committee to Protect Journalists in 1995. We hope we've heard the last of that tune.