How Ted Turner's Vision For CNN Sparked The 24-Hour News Cycle

Published May 12, 2020 at 12:20 PM EDT

Host Jeremy Hobson speaks with journalist and author Lisa Napoli (@lisanapoli) about her new book “Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News.”

Book Excerpt: ‘Up All Night’

By Lisa Napoli

March 2001

His handsome face tired, his silver hair and mustache now fully white— his speech as bombastic as when reporters first anointed him the “Mouth of the South,” a nickname he despised—Ted Turner grabbed the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism as he ascended the stage at the Forum of Public Affairs at Harvard University.

He found the honor amusing. Before him, it had been bestowed on luminary broadcast journalists like Ted Koppel, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, and Lesley Stahl—venerable practitioners whose networks Ted had charged after with nuclear force, changing the very nature of TV. Though he’d never reported a story in his life—though he’d long ago derided news as “evil”—he supposed he had been a journalist of sorts. After all, he still drew a paycheck from a media company, Time Warner, which had acquired his Turner Broadcasting years earlier, including the service for which he was being feted that night—CNN, a source of news to two billion people around the globe. Heck, way back in grade school, he’d hawked newspapers at a streetcar stop for a penny a pop. Didn’t that count as journalism?

Even as a kid, he’d been a salesman above all else, shouting, “EXTRA!” to the passersby to suggest that the latest issue promised big, breaking news.

“It wasn’t an extra,” he confessed to the audience, who lapped up his irreverence, “but I was trying to sell these goddamned papers.”

After a few too many drinks at the pre-event dinner party, he propped up the framed commendation on the seat of a chair next to the podium. The citation proceeded to fall to the floor. He left it there.

“It won’t stand up,” he said, “and I’m having trouble doing the same myself.”

As much as the cocktails, the dismal facts of life since the dawn of the new millennium had knocked him off-kilter.

When clocks ticked into the year 2000, the world had not imploded, as many had expected it might, but Ted’s universe had. Days into the new year, his third wife, the actress Jane Fonda, had moved out. He’d honored her wish that he not run for president of the United States, a job he wanted if only to promote his passion for environmental preservation. Fonda had said she’d leave him if he ran, so he didn’t—she went ahead and split anyway. He loved her still.

“The best lay I ever had,” he’d lamented to the dean’s wife earlier that evening—the ultimate compliment by this inveterate ladies’ man.

Just a few days after that personal loss, a different life-altering bombshell exploded, this one dropped by Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin. Levin had altered the course of Ted’s life before. In 1975, he’d sparked a media revolution when he catapulted a

faltering pay-cable service called HBO into space—then a brand-new frontier. When Ted learned about this pioneering use of a satellite to transmit a television signal, he was inspired to make the copycat move for his little independent station in Atlanta. This changed everything for him, and for the station, and, ultimately, for all of television.

Swept up in this new century by the “irrational exuberance” of the World Wide Web, Levin, now Ted’s boss, had negotiated the sale of their company to a preposterous suitor, the red-hot America Online. Ted had his doubts, but he no longer had any say. Wall Street so disapproved of this merger that Time Warner’s stock tanked. In the past months alone, his personal fortune had shrunk by $3 billion.

Just a week earlier, he’d suffered another incalculable loss—of power. He’d been shunted aside into an emeritus role. The networks he’d created, including CNN, would no longer fall under his control.

Absent his job, his wife, or a healthy slice of his fortune, now he had to stand tall here in Cambridge at the august university that had, decades earlier, rejected his application for admission.*

“If I had come to college here, God knows what I would have accomplished,” he mused, as the audience erupted in laughter. Because, aside from the recent tumult, no one could argue that his achievements had been anything but formidable.

In introducing Ted, his Harvard host extolled him as a “visionary” in the spirit of the savior of the venerable New York Times, Adolph Ochs, or, better yet, Elvis. Elvis Presley changed music. But Ted had done one better. He’d changed America.

Yet few in that audience remembered—if they ever knew at all— the improbable empire-building that had emboldened Ted to believe he could start the very first all-news channel in 1980. Hardly anyone thought the idea could work, much less last—much less that a rogue like him could pull it off. Then, there was the parade of obstacles that had threatened to derail him every step of the way.

That evening, the audience at Harvard wasn’t concerned with history, especially history they didn’t even know. They were worried about CNN’s future and what would become of the news network they relied on now that Ted would no longer be a part of it. Layoffs had just been announced, and the accelerating power of the Internet loomed large. How would that change CNN? a student asked. It already had, Ted responded, his voice tinged with regret. But, he added, he had no crystal ball. All he could do was hope for the best.

Before the digital revolution unleashed a never-ending tsunami of information; back before videotape and portable camera gear and time-code editing and live shots allowed television news to rev more quickly and vividly than ever; way back when the world was a slower, quieter place and television’s crackling black-and-white glow began to muscle radio for mindshare, Ted had been a little boy with a ferocious disciplinary problem about to be shipped off to military school, selling newspapers to commuters on their way home from work—fretting, as he voraciously memorized the stories of kings and battles and explorers, that there were no new worlds left for him to conquer. It was as if the medium of television was waiting for him to come along to upend it.

“I was like Columbus when he left Spain for the new world,” Ted told the amused audience, wistful for that strange and wonderful and faraway moment in time. “He didn’t know where he was going when he started, he didn’t know where he was when he got there, and he didn’t know where he’d been when he got back.”

*After his rejection from Harvard, Ted attended Brown, a school to which he reminded the audience he’d just gifted $100 million—the same sum he’d given Jane Fonda after she’d left. She turned around and pledged $12.5 million of that to fund a gender studies program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. (The award was later rescinded for various reasons, most notably the collapse of the stock.) “Goddamn it,” Ted groused. “I want you to know it’s my money. I love her still.”

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.