Media
Gaylord was the leader of the family which inherited the major Oklahoma City metro newspaper, Daily Oklahoman and other family assets worth $50 million in 1974. Gaylord graduated from Stanford University with a degree in business and continued his studies at Harvard Business School, his education interrupted by World War II.
Gaylord increased the family fortune to $2 billion by the time he died in 2003. He also purchased the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, when it was in dire financial straits and kept it operating. He created The Nashville Network TV Channel, as well as Country Music Television, or CMT, which is similar to MTV, and owned Hee Haw a long running country and western variety show.
The Daily Oklahoman, renamed The Oklahoman, still remains in the family; the editorial tone of the paper now is more accurately described as mostly economic conservative, not unlike "The Wall Street Journal". Gaylord's daughter, publisher Christy Gaylord Everest, now manages the property. Everest, assisted by her sister, Louise Gaylord Bennett, updated the look of the paper and presented opposing viewpoints of issues of public concern.
During the management by Edward Gaylord, the newspaper has been regularly accused of having an ultra conservative Republican /conservative bias in both its news coverage and particularly on its editorial pages. The January/February 1999 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review contained an article, titled "The Worst Newspaper in America," which made a case for that designation.
The Gaylord family of Oklahoma City helped found the world-famous National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City and has given the University of Oklahoma contributions totalling over $50 million in the last three decades, and founded the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Edward Gaylord and his family were actively involved in the formation of the now-defunct and bankrupt Western Pacific Airlines. Recently, the home field of the University of Oklahoma Sooners football team was renamed Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium due to their contributions.
Read more about this topic: Edward Gaylord
Famous quotes containing the word media:
“The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognises neither pity nor pitilessness.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)