When Mel Karmazin presided over CBS and later, when he was the the No. 2 man at Viacom, he made three efforts to combine the network with CNN, he said in an interview on Fox Business Network. "The first person I tried to do that transaction with was Ted Turner. I subsequently tried to do it with Gerry Levin. I subsequently tried to do it with [Richard] Parsons. All of them felt, at that time, that they did not want to sell CNN," Karmazin said. Noting that neither CBS nor ABC has a cable news outlet today, Karmazin added that if he were running either network, "how could I not be thinking about the benefits that could be accrued for shareholders by combining CNN with one of those news organizations?"