On the evening of June 1, 1980, on the lawn of a former country club in Atlanta, a color guard raised three flags — American, Georgia, United Nations — and a red-headed Georgian in a sport coat stepped to a microphone and made a promise that no one running a television operation had ever had reason to make.
“Barring satellite problems,” Ted Turner said, “we won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, we’ll be covering it live, and that will be our last, last event.”
He meant it as a boast, but he had also made it literal. The national anthem that ran at the sign-on was not live; Turner had gathered musicians from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine bands and taped it in advance. When they finished, he had them stay put and play one more piece — the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” — with the camera still running. His instruction was that the second tape stay on a shelf until the end of the world — a nuclear apocalypse, say — at which point it would be the last thing his new channel ever aired. It sat in CNN’s archive under a hold that read, in effect, until the end of the world is confirmed. It has never gone out over the air.
The man who had no business trying
Turner was not a newsman. He had inherited a billboard company. His father, Ed Turner, built Turner Outdoor Advertising into a substantial business and then, in March 1963, shot himself; Ted took over the company at twenty-four. He was reckless, profane, and a gifted salesman, and he spent the next fifteen years turning a stack of billboards into a media empire by seeing value where established men saw junk.
In 1970 he bought a failing Atlanta UHF station, Channel 17, and renamed it WTCG — “Watch This Channel Grow” — and stuffed it with old sitcoms, cartoons, and wrestling. The breakthrough came in December 1976, when the signal started going up to a satellite and back down to cable systems in other states. Getting there had required a piece of paperwork sleight of hand: federal rules barred a station owner from also owning the uplink that carried him, so a year earlier Turner had sold the satellite company he built for the purpose to a former Western Union executive, Ed Taylor, for a dollar — and then paid Taylor’s firm to beam him out. A scrappy local channel became a “superstation,” piped within a few years into millions of homes from Maine to California. That trick — satellite up, cable down — was the thing nobody else had fully grasped, and it made Turner rich. It also gave him an idea that everyone he told thought was insane.
The three broadcast networks aired news in fixed, rationed doses: a half hour in the evening, a little in the morning, bulletins when something exploded. News was a loss leader, a prestige cost you absorbed to keep your license. Turner’s proposition was that you could fill an entire channel with it, twenty-four hours a day, and that people would watch — not all of it, not at once, but whenever they wanted, the way they used a faucet.
Building the thing
The man who told Turner it could actually be done was Reese Schonfeld, a veteran of the wire-service film business who had spent years thinking about how a national news operation might run on satellites and an “electronic newsroom” instead of the enormous infrastructure of a CBS. Schonfeld’s estimate was that it would take on the order of fifteen to twenty million dollars to start and would bleed money for years. Turner heard that and committed anyway.
To raise the cash he sold WRET, his television station in Charlotte, for about twenty million dollars — a record price for a UHF station. He hired Schonfeld as the first president of the Cable News Network and gave him a staff of roughly three hundred: about a hundred and seventy in Atlanta, another hundred and thirty scattered across bureaus in Washington, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. He converted a mansion on Techwood Drive — the old country club — into a newsroom.
The people he had to convince were not buying it. The conventional wisdom in the industry was that a round-the-clock news channel run on a shoestring would not survive six months. The established networks had decades of pedigree and news divisions spending on the order of a hundred million dollars a year; Turner proposed to fill twenty-four hours on roughly a third of what any one of them spent. It did not take long for the mockery to find its permanent form. Within a year of the launch, network executives had a name for Turner’s low salaries and thin budgets — Chicken Noodle News, later stretched to the Chicken Noodle Network — and it stuck for most of a decade.
6:05 p.m.
CNN signed on at six with Turner’s introduction and the anthem. Five minutes later, at 6:05, the first newscast began, anchored by David Walker and Lois Hart, a married couple who had moved from Sacramento to take the jobs. There was no music, no graphics, no flourish — two people at a desk, reading.
The lead was a real story, and a grim one. Three days earlier, Vernon Jordan, the president of the National Urban League, had been shot and badly wounded by a sniper outside a hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That very afternoon President Carter had flown in to visit him in the hospital. CNN opened with a live report from Fort Wayne — Jordan’s condition, still serious but stable, and the reaction in the city to both the shooting and the president’s visit. It was the kind of same-day, on-the-ground live feed that the broadcast networks simply had no slot for at six on a Sunday.
What followed, over the next hours, was a rush of the ordinary and the far-flung, which was exactly the point: the opening of hurricane season, oil prices out of Saudi Arabia, a taped interview with President Carter conducted by the veteran correspondent Daniel Schorr, the first live satellite feed from Jerusalem, a parking-lot dispute involving the ballplayer Reggie Jackson, a drug arrest involving a former child actor. Some of it was polished; much of it was not. Cameras had been stolen from the Los Angeles bureau days before launch.
When Lois Hart handed off that first hour, she said the sentence that captured what was actually new. Stay with us, she told the audience — there would be news and sports and weather and features “coming from now on and forever.”
No one in television had ever meant “forever” quite that way.
The long climb
For years, CNN looked like a mistake. It lost money steadily, roughly two million dollars a month at the start — which was precisely what Turner had told everyone to expect for at least the first eighteen months. It was mocked, undercovered, and shut out — its reporters were initially barred from the pool that covered the White House, on the theory that a cable upstart didn’t count. Turner and Schonfeld fell out over spending and programming — the last straw was Schonfeld’s move to drop a prime-time host Turner wanted kept — and Turner fired him in 1982.
Then the arithmetic turned. In 1985 CNN and its Headline News sibling posted their first operating profit together, nearly nineteen million dollars, and the ridicule began to sound dated. The proof that ended the argument came on January 17, 1991, when American bombs began falling on Baghdad. Other networks had correspondents in the city too, but the first round of bombing took out the central telephone exchange and their transmissions died with it. CNN had spent months pressing the Iraqis for permission to install a four-wire circuit — in essence a private audio line out to Amman that bypassed the Baghdad system entirely — and unlike the other networks, which wanted one too, it got approval. The Iraqis did not altogether grasp that the line reached Atlanta, and let it stand even after they worked it out. So three CNN men in a room at the al-Rashid Hotel, Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett, simply kept talking, describing the flashes over the skyline. They told the world the war had begun twenty-seven minutes before the U.S. military announced it. For hours, the whole world, including the Pentagon, watched the war on Turner’s channel.
The idea people had laughed at was that news could be a thing you turned to at any hour and found already running. Every rolling news channel, every live blog, every push alert that lights a phone at three in the morning descends from a promise made on a country-club lawn in Atlanta — that the broadcast would not stop until there was nothing left to broadcast to.