CBS Stock Jumps on Talk of a New Ted Turner Bid

Apparently fueled by resurgent takeover speculation, shares of CBS Inc. rose sharply again Wednesday, jumping $2.875 to close at $109.625 on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was 535,700 shares. The stock has risen more than $20 per share in the last month.

Market analysts attributed Wednesday’s trading to a published report that Atlanta television magnate Ted Turner had lined up financial backing of $50 million each from MCI Communications Inc. and financier William E. Simon, a former Treasury secretary, to make a bid for CBS. The report appeared in Wednesday’s editions of the New York Times.

MCI issued a statement Wednesday denying that it has made a commitment to finance the deal. Although MCI executives did attend a meeting held by investment bankers “where the topic of CBS came up,” the statement said, “we left having made no commitment and having reached no agreement. You should not read anything into the fact that we attended, in that it is not unusual for us to do that.”

A secretary for Simon said that “he has absolutely no comment.” Turner was also unavailable for comment.

Turner, whose Atlanta-based broadcast empire includes Cable News Network, has surfaced twice recently in speculation about the potential for a CBS takeover.

The first came on March 1, when he was reported to have approached Federal Communications Commission members about the possibility of a hostile takeover of an unidentified television network, and the second when it was disclosed that he had met with members of Fairness in Media, a conservative group that had threatened a proxy fight at the CBS annual meeting over the network’s news policies. That fight was dropped last week.

CBS executives have minimized the Turner threat at each stage; at a presentation to Wall Street securities analysts last month, CBS Chairman Thomas H. Wyman said that he did not consider Turner a serious bidder because he was under-financed. On Wednesday, CBS executives were described as “not taking (the latest reports) seriously.”

Wall Street analysts believe a hostile takeover of CBS would cost about $4 billion, a sum not currently known to be within Turner’s reach, with or without MCI’s and Simon’s backing.