The prince of youth expands his realm

Freston is tasked with remaking Paramount in the MTV mold.

I usually enjoy passing along birthday greetings, but some birthdays are downright unsettling. Take the notion of Tom Freston turning 60 this week. That's the Freston who was the spearhead of the MTV revolution; the man who's plugged into the youth culture; the iconoclast who started his career in Afghanistan and who does trendy things like giving his executives sheepskin UGG boots as Christmas presents!

Sure, Tom Freston has a perfect right to turn a year older. It just makes the rest of us feel, well, five or six years older.

Of course, Freston is no longer just Mr. MTV. He's the mega-suit who runs the "other" Viacom -- the one that Les Moonves mischievously describes as the "growth part of Viacom." In his new role, Freston is cast as the miracle worker who's reshaping Paramount, empowering the Nickelodeon and MTV franchises, reinventing Paramount Classics, rebuilding a new international distribution company and otherwise making his empire seem...well, youthful.

MTV president Van Toffler used to say, "If we start coming off like our parents, kids aren't going to listen to us."

Hear that, Tom? Everyone's got to seem energized and boyish.

In describing the MTV style, Freston once said, "There is no dress code, but there's no full-frontal nudity." That's fun. It's irreverent. But now Freston's a mogul and runs a very large company.

"Large is no longer in charge," Sumner Redstone said in announcing Freston's appointment. That's fine to say, except the total revenues of Freston's branch of Viacom -- the "growth part" -- now totals $9 billion. Sounds large to me.

Of course, Freston has defied all expectations thus far. Many expected him to take a go-slow approach at the Paramount studio, but then he blew the whole place up. Insiders said his new executive appointments would reflect savvy and experience. Well, the one common denominator of his appointments is that every new appointee is new to his job.

Freston has turned out to be a bit of a revolutionary, but it's been a very civilized revolution. That's because he is something of a corporate anomaly. Ask friends and associates to assess him, and you get the same report: Tom Freston is a truly decent man. Even as a corporate player, he tries to be fair and civil. His creased Irish face always displays the same poker-player's calm. But beneath the surface is a fierce iconoclast whose politics are liberal and whose tastes are eclectic. He wants to build a corporate edifice that reflects his sensibility.

All of which is terrific, except turning 60 doesn't help.

Journal jitters

Confusion may reign at the broadcast networks from time to time, but that's nothing compared with the mess at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The latest round was triggered by a report by the so-called "inspector general" charging that the former CPB chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, was so eager to give the Bushies a bigger voice in programming that he violated the organization's "code of ethics." To be sure, few of us knew that the CPB had an inspector general or, for that matter, a code of ethics.

All this sent the Wall St. Journal's editorial board into high dudgeon. In one of the longest and most turgid editorials in Journal history, Tomlinson was vigorously defended and the inspector general eviscerated. Toward the bottom of the editorial, we learn that one of the reasons the Journal is so upset is that its own show, "The Journal Editorial Report," will go off the air after two seasons. It seems PBS stations in eight of the top 30 TV markets had stopped running the show, and another four had stuck it in the post-midnight dead zone.

Now the Journal insists Tomlinson had nothing to do with putting its show on the air to begin with (it was Pat Mitchell's initiative) and that the chairman never interfered with the show's content. The only reason the Journal started the show, it said, was to prevent PBS from becoming a "satrapy" of Bill Moyers. The Journal's editorial board has always opposed PBS funding.

To the mindset of the Journal, its PBS adventure failed mainly because all those lefty PBS stations "blackballed" its show.

But the Tomlinson episode represented the last straw.

Actually, I'll miss the Journal's PBS rants. As satrapies go, theirs was a rather congenial one. It's too bad they're in such a snit about it.