Ted Turner didn't have anything nice to say about Rupert Murdoch in a Tuesday morning interview with Bloomberg TV. "I think he's going to have to step down," said Turner referring to Murdoch's role in the phone hacking scandal. "So far, this is serious. It's going against the law. Not even Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to break the law. Nobody should." Turner even made made it personal. "He should have known. He was chairman of the board. He's responsible. I took responsibility when I ran my company. You never heard me say 'well, I didn't know'."

This is the same media mogul that challenged the News Corp. chairman to a fist fight after a Murdoch-sponsored boat sunk his schooner in the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race in 2003. A few weeks later he called Murdoch a "warmonger" for supporting the Iraq invasion. This was all five years after he tried to keep Murdoch from buying the Los Angeles Dodgers. However most prescient to his most recent Murdoch fighting-words is what he said after the launch of Fox News in 1996. "How do you make peace with a mega-maniac?" Mr Turner once said of Mr Murdoch. "When you've got somebody like that, I don't think there's a spark of human decency in him--except he likes his family."

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Adam Clark Estes