‘News will be the star’: Ted Turner’s extraordinary uphill battle to launch CNN
(CNN) — Banks scoffed. Potential partners rejected him. Newspaper owners mocked the idea. But Ted Turner persevered and won.
Turner faced an extraordinary uphill battle to launch CNN in 1980. Before the network became an institution, a shorthand for 24/7 breaking news around the world, it was a dare that many people considered unserious and some derided as “Chicken Noodle News.”
Turner willed the network into being at great personal and financial risk.
“I just wanted to see if we could do it — like Christopher Columbus,” he once said. “When you do something that’s never been done before, sail on uncharted waters and don’t know where you’re going, you’re not sure what you’re going to find when you get there, but at least you’re going somewhere.”
Turner saw a huge opening in the television marketplace, a chance to supersede the ABC, NBC and CBS broadcast networks that only allotted half an hour for news at night.
To the broadcasters, and many others, the premise seemed absurd: Who would watch the news at 2 p.m.? Or 2 a.m.? And who would pay for it?
But Turner thought “the big, powerful networks were captives of market studies,” Hank Whittemore wrote in 1990’s “CNN: The Inside Story.”
The broadcasters “took poll after poll of the demand out there, and all their surveys plainly showed that news was a clunker,” Whittemore wrote.
Turner didn’t believe much in market research. He trusted his gut. And he bet that if he created a supply of 24/7 news, the demand would follow.
He also wanted to stick it to the broadcasters he viewed as smug and self-satisfied. “They loved having just a three-channel environment,” Turner said. Turner loved the chance to disrupt the entire industry.
So in 1978, he talked with associates about producing a never-ending newscast — a costly, round-the-clock effort built for a cable world that had not yet really arrived.
“I’m gonna call it Cable News Network,” he told Reese Schonfeld, CNN’s founding president.
Turner — who took over his father’s billboard company and expanded it into films and TV — admitted he knew “diddley-squat” about the news business. He brashly claimed he disliked the news altogether until he began to market CNN.
Crucially, Turner recruited people like Schonfeld who knew who to hire and what to order. But it was a battle every step of the way. Turner and his colleagues had fights over satellites, staffing needs, distribution strategies and everything else.
Recruiting journalists to the startup was one of the steepest challenges, Turner recalled in his memoir “Call Me Ted.” But the mogul’s maverick attitude appealed to some just as it scared off others.
“We didn’t often get people who were at the height of their careers,” he recalled, “but we did find some promising up-and-comers who were attracted by CNN and the chance to be on the ground floor of something new, ambitious, and exciting.”
Some of those new hires might not have realized how far Turner was financially stretching to get the network on the air. Turner risked his personal wealth, knowing he barely had any runway to keep it going, and later said he “stayed just a step ahead of the bankers.”
Turner was “a wild man,” a “go-for-broke idea guy whose craziest idea, perhaps, was a global television network,” one of CNN’s original anchors, Mary Alice Williams, said in a statement Wednesday.
His vision, she said, was a network “that could connect the whole world so that all of us could see each other. See our shared common challenges and share solutions. In the belief that maybe — maybe! — there’d be a chance at peace in this troubled world.”
The launch was set for June 1, 1980. A combined Armed Forces Band performed at the ceremony outside CNN’s Techwood campus, a former country club on Techwood Drive in Atlanta, Georgia. Turner asked the band to play the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and had a camera crew record it, suggesting the tape could be taken off the shelf and aired in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.
“Barring satellite problems in the future, we won’t be signing off until the world ends,” Turner remarked.
Meteorologist Flip Spiceland, who led a weather report on the first hour, said Turner “had decided we’d go on air at 5:00 June 1st, ready or not. We were closer to ‘not’ than ‘ready’!”
The husband-wife duo of Dave Walker and Lois Hart anchored the first newscast with no fancy introduction, no mission statement, just an immediate recitation of the day’s headlines.
The major concern “was whether or not we could fill 24/7,” Walker recalled later. “As it turns out, we could. We had more than enough news.”
There were glitches and gaffes aplenty. One time, a janitor walked right up to CNN anchor Bernard Shaw’s desk and emptied his wastebasket while he was on the air. The mishaps and mini-crises bonded the staff together and sometimes amused the viewing audience as well.
“Here is news, alive with all its wonderful technical warts and missed cues,” a reviewer for Variety magazine wrote after the launch.
Staffers fondly recalled that Turner kept a private apartment above the original CNN office. “He was one of us,” former CNN president Tom Johnson recalled. “I mean, he would be in his house coat down having breakfast in the hard news cafe.”
And his presence was needed, for the uphill battles continued. CNN had to fight for White House credentials. Fight for resources. Fight for its right to exist. But ultimately, former CNN anchor Judy Woodruff said Wednesday, Turner “proved all the critics wrong. I mean, he was the one who literally made it happen.”
Day by day, story by story, CNN supplied live coverage of the news and proved there was demand to bear witness in real time.
The broadcast executives who had thought Turner was nuts now had to ponder launching 24/7 news channels of their own.
Turner dedicated CNN “to America” in 1980, but he got even more ambitious before long.
In 1982, while on a visit to Cuba, Turner found out that Fidel Castro was a loyal CNN viewer, apparently using a smuggled satellite dish. That’s the moment, Turner said later, when he thought, “If Fidel Castro can’t live without CNN, well, we ought to be able to sell this all over the world.”
He started cutting international distribution deals and built the channel now known as CNN International, which literally connected the world through TV.
Turner didn’t just create the “first-ever global TV 24/7 behemoth network,” CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour recalled Wednesday. “He also chipped down the walls of state-run and authoritarian-regulated media.”
In “all these nations where the people could only see what they were fed by their authoritarian leaders… he gave them something else,” Amanpour said. “He opened their eyes to the rest of the world.”
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