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    The King of Content: Sumner Redstone's Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire
    Unavailable
    The King of Content: Sumner Redstone's Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire
    Unavailable
    The King of Content: Sumner Redstone's Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire
    Ebook518 pages7 hours

    The King of Content: Sumner Redstone's Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire

    By Keach Hagey

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The remarkable story of Sumner Redstone, his family legacy, and the battles for all he controlled.

    Sumner Murray Redstone (1923–2020), who lived by the credo "content is king," leveraged his father’s chain of drive-in movie theaters into one of the world’s greatest media empires through a series of audacious takeovers designed to ensure his permanent control. Over the course of this meteoric rise, he made his share of enemies and feuded with nearly every member of his family.

    In The King of Content, Keach Hagey deconstructs Redstone’s rise from Boston’s West End through Harvard Law School to the highest echelons of American business. The ninety-seven-year-old mogul’s life became a tabloid soap opera, the center of acrimonious legal battles throughout his vast holdings, which included Paramount Pictures and two of the largest public media companies, Viacom and CBS. At the heart of these lawsuits was Redstone’s tumultuous love life and complicated relationship with his children. Redstone’s daughter, Shari, has emerged as his de facto successor, but only after she ousted his closest confidant in a fierce power struggle.

    Yet Redstone’s assets face an existential threat that goes beyond his family, disgruntled ex-girlfriends, or even the management of his companies: the changing nature of media consumption. As more and more people cut their cable cords, CBS, with its focus on sports and broadcast TV, has held steady, while Viacom, with its once-great cable channels like MTV and Nickelodeon, has suffered a precipitous fall. As their rivals merge, the question is whether Shari’s push to undo her father’s last big strategic maneuver and recombine CBS and Viacom will be enough to shore up their future.

    A biography and corporate whodunit filled with surprising details, The King of Content investigates Redstone’s impact on business and popular culture, as well as the family feuds, corporate battles, and questionable alliances that go back decades—all laid bare in this authoritative book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 26, 2018
    ISBN9780062654113
    Author

    Keach Hagey

    Keach Hagey is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, covering television and large media companies. Her team’s reporting on the power struggle at Viacom won a “Best in Business” award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Previously, she covered media for Politico, the National, CBSNews.com, and the Village Voice. She lives in Irvington, New York.

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    • 3/5
      Redstone was formerly the executive chairman of both CBS and Viacom. Future shareholders of mass media conglomerate ViacomCBS, in turn, the parent company of the Paramount Pictures film studio, the CBS television network, and various cable networks. In February 2016, at age 92, Redstone resigned from both chairmanships following a court-ordered examination by a geriatric psychiatrist. He was ultimately succeeded by Les Moonves at CBS and Philippe Dauman at Viacom.[Redstone’s rise from Boston’s West End through Harvard Law School to the highest echelons of American business. Became a tabloid soap opera, the center of acrimonious legal battles throughout his vast holdings the changing nature of media consumption and corporate whodunit filled with surprising details, The King of Content investigates Redstone’s impact on business and popular culture, as well as the family feuds, corporate battles, and questionable alliances that go back decades once feared as the “mad genius” of media that had built one of the world’s greatest media empires through a series of audacious takeovers constructed to ensure that he always maintained control. Through exclusive interviews and hundreds of pages of legal documents, Keach Hagey reveals the story behind the rise and fall of this remarkable figure.