by Lisa Napoli
Was it that Reese had made the unilateral decision to dump Sandi Freeman, who he’d decided was lightweight?
Was it that he replaced her with a duo from local Washington radio, Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan, on a show that would be named Crossfire? Ted had called them “turkeys.”
Was it that without asking Ted, he’d hired talk show host Mike Douglas on a two-year contract for a decidedly non-CNN salary of a million dollars?3
Would it have made a difference if Reese had actually read the copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People that Ted had handed him months earlier in response to complaints about his iron, belligerent rule?
Was Ted pissed that Reese had yanked him off the air last fall when he was testifying to Congress about sex and violence on TV?
Hadn’t Reese successfully staved off the encroaching threat of a union, which could have crushed the budget?
Wasn’t Ted happy to have settled the anti-trust White House pool suit with the networks, which meant CNN would now be included in this rarefied group? Ever since, the presidential press office had referred in its schedules to the four television networks.
Was it the whispers from other top brass who hated Reese and his brash style and wished to get their hands on this trophy?
The list was long, but the why, in the end, didn’t matter. Yes, Reese had unquestionably served as Frankenstein, toiling tirelessly to build the beast. But ultimately, it was Ted who owned the monster.
On his way into midtown at Ted’s command, he’d stopped off and picked up his old friend and ally Burt Reinhardt for backup. But Ted wished to see Reese alone.
We’re going to make some changes, he told his founding president. He was rehiring Sandi Freeman, he said, and putting her back on the air. And Reese was out. He’d be paid through the end of his contract.
Like that, in a flash, the dream was over.
* * *
As a media swarm awaited the rescue of a little girl in the fall of 1987, Reese was fully settled back in New York, angling to launch a daily syndicated show called Crime Watch Tonight, with ten bureaus around the world that promised to unearth stories of terrorism and espionage and violence, all conveniently fed to subscribers by satellite. As his producer on this unabashedly tabloid show, possible only in an age of new technology, he’d hired none other than the man whose sensibilities fit this project so well: Ted Kavanau.
In Midland, the rescue operation had plodded along for two nights and three days now, straight into Friday night prime time. Television viewers could choose from I Married Dora on ABC, about a single dad who weds his undocumented housekeeper, followed by sci-fi borg sensation Max Headroom. CBS aired Beauty and the Beast, about a man-beast and his bond with a district attorney. NBC played Rags to Riches, about a self-made millionaire who adopts six orphans, then the sexy crime drama Miami Vice.
Anchors sat at the ready in the network newsrooms in New York. When it seemed that a conclusion to the ordeal was minutes away, all three broadcast networks dumped out of the entertainment and joined in, marveling that they had a better view of the action than their reporters in the field.
On CNN, the unscripted drama of reality was, as usual, the centerpiece. Hooked up to a satellite truck provided by their affiliate from Dallas, the network had three cameras trained on the action. Tony Clark hushed the anchor: “Let the pictures speak for themselves.” And at long last, weary, dirt-encrusted workers triumphantly extracted tiny Jessica and held her up like a trophy for all the world to see, to whoops and cries and wonderment.4
The drama complete, ABC, CBS and NBC resumed their entertainment programming. But on CNN, the news continued.
A symphony of horns alerted the people of Midland that one of their own was safe. But the reverie was superfluous. No one needed to go outside to know what had happened. Thanks to television, all over town and all around the planet, millions of people already knew. That night, CNN scored its highest ratings ever.
1 Ted made a third trip in 1990, with a different paramour, Kathy Leach. This time, he did conduct a taped, sit-down interview with Castro. It was widely criticized for being softball. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvnUwvnvxgw.
2 Whether it would be possible for someone with Ted’s long history of outrageous comments and behavior to run for president never seemed to be his concern. Perhaps the most pointed example of this was a flight he took with Playboy interviewer Peter Ross Range in 1983. Liz Wickersham accompanied them as they rode and talked in first class, though Range was asked not to mention that fact. When Ted became angry with Range’s questioning about his television programming, he ripped the recorder out of the reporter’s hand, threw it at the cockpit door, and then did the same with his bag of tapes. Next, he stood up and began stomping on them, like grapes. When Ted retreated to the bathroom, Wickersham explained that he was under tremendous pressure and that once he’d kicked her in the shins.
3 Reese writes in his memoir that his first choice had been Tom Snyder and his second, legendary director Orson Welles, who in his later years had written a newspaper column. Perhaps it’s for the best that he didn’t go to work for CNN. Several years later, when Ted acquired the MGM film library and stated his intention to colorize classic black-and-white films, Welles famously commanded before his death, “Don’t let Ted Turner deface my movies with his crayons.”
4 CNN cameraman David Rust, who worked for the network from launch until 2019, “procured” one of the little girl’s socks that fell off as she was whisked away to the hospital. It’s one tiny item in his exhaustive collection of memorabilia amassed from his lifetime in the field.
AFTERWORD
June 2000
Even before he landed in Atlanta for the twentieth-anniversary party, Reese had made up his mind how he’d cast his role at the affair. The part of “bastard at the wedding” seemed apropos.
He couldn’t feel less wanted. No invitation had been issued to him for the tenth anniversary, which stung. The pain was more acute eight months after that, during CNN’s most celebrated moment, in 1991, when on a terrifying, triumphant night a trio of his guys—Bernie Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett—bravely narrated the launch of war from the ninth floor of a hotel in Baghdad. Reese happened to be traveling for business in Paris, and the next morning at breakfast all the other gobsmacked guests could talk about was the dramatic heroism they’d witnessed on television the night before.
He wanted to scream to these awestruck new admirers of the network, “I started CNN. CNN is my thing.”
Since Ted had fired him, he’d had his hand in so many other “things.” His credit as founding president served him well as he helped to launch a twenty-four-hour news channel on Long Island and, later, the Television Food Network—a particular feat for a man who’d had the kitchen removed from his apartment. He’d consulted for various blue-chip media companies on a wide variety of projects involving a wide range of subjects from international business news, medical news, and fiber optics. He’d shopped the idea of a new twenty-four-hour cable news format in conjunction with ABC and the New York Times. None of it, none of it, ever approximated the thrill of invention he’d experienced with CNN. He was a newsman, first and foremost. He longed to be back in the fray he’d created. In late 1997, he was so desperate to get back into it, he even called Ted to ask him for a job—any job.
Meetings then at the network went, not surprisingly, nowhere. His reputation preceded him. And now, here he was a few years later, lodged at a third-rate hotel in a room he had to pay for himself, across a highway from where the VIPs had been invited to stay gratis as they celebrated his baby. How many people recalled, as he did, the toil of invention, the roadblocks, the widespread doubt, the financial precariousness. There’d been weeks when it wasn’t clear Ted could make payroll.
Now CNN inhabited a rarefied and admired perch, even going so far as to tout itself as the “world’s most important network.” The combined revenue for CNN and He
adline News totaled $800 million. Ferocious competition had arrived in the form of all-news channels Fox, and then MSNBC. The constant heroin-drip rush of news now being transmitted by the Internet had obliterated what little there was left of time and space. There was no clock anymore, just an endless stream of information. Or was it noise? No one of any age could recall that quaint, long-ago past when news aired only at dinnertime and wasn’t available instantly.
Reese’s prediction had proven to be spot-on: The public indeed possessed a voracious appetite for news it didn’t even know it had.
When he picked up his name tag at the CNN Center, just another face in the crowd, Reese felt another slap: His name was misspelled. Way back when, it was just the pronunciation Ted got wrong. He’d add another syllable: “Scho-en-field.” The next blow: A commemorative book credited someone else with hiring Peter Arnett, damn it. The jealousy overwhelmed him when he spotted “his” Jane Maxwell, now senior vice president of special events, hugging Time Warner’s Jerry Levin, the man for whom he’d produced a news pilot at HBO—the man who now dictated Ted’s fate.1
In 1997, having sold the entirety of Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner and finding himself a multibillionaire, Ted impetuously announced a ten-year, billion-dollar pledge to the United Nations. As a nod toward his reinvention as a philanthropist, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was on the agenda to speak that day.
But Ted’s fortune was now on the decline. Earlier in the year, there’d been a disastrous turn of events: Time Warner’s merger with AOL, eventually classified as the biggest mistake in corporate history. And that had been announced just days after Jane Fonda had packed up and left him. He was now all but a figurehead at the company he created.
“I’m in spiritual and mental pain,” he told a reporter. “When you’ve worked to build a company for forty years and you know all the people there and one day it’s gone, well, that’s a hard transition for anyone. It’s like taking your pencil away and telling you you can’t write anymore.”
He was sharpening the pencil now, hoping to invest in a broadcast network in Russia. Besides that virtual real estate, he was buying thousands of acres of land in the United States, focusing his energies on environmental preservation. Watchful Time-Warner PR staff swirled around him at the CNN Center to make sure reporters who’d been invited to cover the carefully orchestrated festivities didn’t get too close. He was as frank and as outspoken as ever, and he was miserable.
Seated at a table yards away from the podium, Reese and his wife, Pat, listened as former president Jimmy Carter extolled the wonders of CNN in helping spread the power of peace. CNN isn’t the agent of peace, Reese thought bitterly—just the messenger boy. Up on stage, the current CNN president, Tom Johnson, acknowledged that the founding CNN president, “Reese Scho-en-field,” was in their midst. Big Mo genially rose to applause and attempted a joke, “Thank you, Tom, for throwing this party for me.” But he was too far back for the joke to work. Even his booming voice couldn’t carry that far.
Running into old allies like Burt Reinhardt, now the emeritus second president of CNN, Mike Boettcher, who’d become an award-winning war correspondent, and Liz Wickersham, happily married to an attorney in New York, helped soften this visit, while at the same time making it feel a bit more anthropological. For Reese was writing a book to set the record straight. All those years earlier, he’d been too numb to feel much in the aftermath of his ouster. Numbness then morphed into anger. Every chance he got, he publicly railed against the network’s poor choices, poor ratings, how it had become “bloated and constipated.” A book would be his chance to claim his place in history.
History was becoming the place where many of the originals resided.
As for Bill Tush, Ted’s first newsman and cable television’s very first star, he’d gone on to serve as CNN’s roving entertainment correspondent. Early channel 17 viewers never forgot that time he’d co-hosted the news with a German shepherd. Way back when, Ted had promised Tush he’d have a job as long as he did. And he had. He left CNN in 2002.
Daniel Schorr lasted at the network only through 1985. The year before, he’d been asked to provide political analysis alongside a former governor. This outraged Schorr. A politician wasn’t a political analyst! He should not be seated next to a journalist! Burt Reinhardt had refused to continue guaranteeing the clause Schorr had insisted on when he’d taken the job—the clause that said he didn’t have to do or say anything he didn’t want to. As if being fired wasn’t bad enough, CNN had demanded its satellite dish back, too. Take it as long as you landscape the hole in the ground, he told them. They just left it.
Sandi Freeman exited around the same time. After Ted resurrected her, she’d moved her program to New York, divorced her husband, and married her agent. When, at the end of her contract, Ted got tired of negotiating with him, he called late-night radio talk show host Larry King and offered him $200,000, twice what he was currently earning, to take over the plum evening talk slot. Though he was reluctant to give up his evenings—prime time for dating—he figured the gig was worth a shot.2
* * *
When Reese and Pat discovered that their seats for the twentieth-anniversary festivities weren’t anywhere near each other, they skulked back to the third-rate hotel instead. This trip down memory lane, coming face-to-face with so many of the people whose careers Reese had launched, whose lives CNN had changed, triggered his capacity, at long last, to mourn. Unable to sleep, twenty years to the day after his greatest achievement, he sat up in the shadowy room and cried.
Celebratory fireworks were scheduled for the night CNN turned twenty, along with a party featuring a performance by Diana Ross and the Supremes—a far cry from the armed forces band that entertained guests on launch day. That tape of “Nearer My God to Thee” still sat on the hold shelf, waiting for the apocalypse.
And the apocalypse arrived, after a fashion, in 2019, a year before CNN’s fortieth anniversary. That’s when AT&T, deemed such a powerful monopoly that it had been smashed apart by government decree back in 1982, received government approval to proceed with its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The telecommunications giant, almighty once again, announced not long after that it would sunset what was left of Ted Turner’s name from the businesses he’d created. The consolation prize: The campus of the old Progressive Club, now home to myriad other Turner networks, was dedicated late in 2019 to “The Original Maverick.” A soaring mural depicting a youthful Ted beside a mountain range was also revealed, a nod to his more recent work in environmental preservation.
From the front lawn where he’d stood on that June Sunday in 1980, a now-frail eighty-one-year-old Ted told the guests who gathered in his honor that the media company he created remained his greatest professional achievement. Despite his diminished state, his feisty spirit was still in evidence. “I didn’t really leave [CNN] because I wanted to,” he said. “But anyway . . . here I am!”
Blocks away on West Peachtree Street, the original WTCG building sits slated for demolition, as developers plan to erect two residential towers on the site. Even a majestic old tree out front that Ted once told Tush would outlive them all is red-tagged.
Despite the many changes, the name “CNN” survives. Not even the mighty phone company, recast as a modern media giant, can obliterate the spirit of exploration and singular moment in time that gave rise to the first all-news channel—and, for better or worse, the news revolution it sparked.
1 Jane retired in 2009. Her husband, Rick, founder of the network’s Satellites and Circuits desk, left CNN in 1985 and started an industry newsletter.
2 Larry King hosted his show on CNN for twenty-five years.
Timeline
March 1963
Ted Turner’s father dies. Ted takes over Turner Outdoor.
1968
Ted buys radio station WAPO in Chattanooga; renames it WGOW.
1969
WGOW merges with Rice Broadcasting.
1970
WTCG debuts on January 1, 1970.
Ted purchases WCTU in Charlotte; renames it WRET.
1972
Importation of distant signals allowed by FCC.
April 6, 1973
WTCG throws “Thank the Viewers” party.
April 20, 1973
WRET initiates all-night broadcasting on Fridays.
1973
Ted signs deal to air Atlanta Braves games on WTCG.
August 19, 1974
WTCG begins airing twenty-four hours, six days a week.
December 3, 1975
Ted has Earth station installed.
January 14, 1976
Ted purchases the Atlanta Braves.
July 20, 1976
Ted testifies before Congress on cable television oversight.
December 17, 1976
WTCG goes up on the satellite.
April 1977
WTCG goes twenty-four hours, seven days a week.
Ted attempts to buy Orlando station WSWB Channel 35; later denied.
September 1977
Ted wins America’s Cup.
September 1, 1978
WRET launches Action News format after winning NBC affiliation.
December 1978
Ted floats the idea for CNN to National Cable and Telecommunications Association board. Flops.
May 5, 1979
Braves GM Bill Lucas dies; Ted rekindles the CNN idea.
May 21, 1979
Ted announces CNN at NCTA show in Las Vegas with Reese Schonfeld and Daniel Schorr.
May 24, 1979
Ted buys call letters WTBS from MIT’s radio station.
June 1979
Ted testifies before Congress a second time.