Call Me Ted

by Ted Turner

  For years I had been selling off our billboard interests to help fund our expansion into television and to launch the SuperStation. I decided that if we moved ahead with news, it would be necessary to part with WRET in Charlotte, which we believed we could sell for around $20 million. Even with these proceeds it was clear that this business would never make it on advertising revenue alone. We needed commitments from cable companies not only to carry the service, but to pay us a per-subscriber fee as well.

  As straightforward as the concept for an all-news channel was, I wanted to name the service before we marketed it. My family name had been on each of our businesses, but in this case, knowing how much we’d need the cable operators’ support, I decided to emphasize “cable” and call it the Cable News Network—CNN. My reasoning was simple; using “cable” in the name would not only bring attention to this relatively new means of distribution, it would help motivate cable operators to carry us. After all, if someone signed up for cable, they’d have to assume that they would receive the Cable News Network.

  With a name for the channel and a rough idea of expenses, I decided to test the waters at the annual Western Cable Show in December of 1978. Terry McGuirk and I arranged for a meeting with the board of the NCTA—essentially the heads of all the major cable companies—and there I described my plans for the Cable News Network. In addition to telling them how great this service would be for our industry I let them know that the only way we could make it work was to charge a fee of 15 cents per subscriber per month ($1.80 per year). At that point cable was only available to about 10 million homes so even if we were launched in each and every single household, our total cable fee revenue would be $18 million, not enough to cover our annual expenses.

  We’d try to make up that difference in advertising sales, I explained, but that would be a very tough go in the early years. I told them that I wasn’t asking them to risk anything—they didn’t need to make an up-front investment with us, they simply had to pay us if we delivered the product. At the end of this fairly brief presentation I passed around copies of a contract and asked each of them to sign it. Essentially, it said that if I put CNN on the air, they would carry it and pay. Not surprisingly, they balked at signing a document like this on the spot with such short notice but I left with confidence, feeling that we would have the industry’s support.

  With little news expertise in house I had to go outside to find someone to run this operation. The SuperStation was still about a year away from turning profitable and resources were scarce (in fact, there were several within Turner Broadcasting who were lobbying me not to move forward with CNN for fear that it would bankrupt the company). Needing an executive who could run the operation on a shoestring, I couldn’t look to the broadcast networks. Instead, I became interested in a small outfit called the Independent Television News Association, or ITNA. They were in the business of supplying video news stories to independent TV stations across the country and had a reputation for producing a high volume of product at a low cost. I asked around about their president, Reese Schonfeld, who everyone said would be perfect for what I had in mind.

  When I called and explained the concept of CNN to Reese, he got it right away and was really excited. He would have accepted the job right then but he had another year left to go on his contract at ITNA. Shortly after our initial call but well before his term was out, he agreed to come on board and began to contribute to our planning and development process on a part-time basis. During this period, Reese made our first full-time hire, Burt Reinhardt. Burt would serve as Reese’s number two and not only was he a terrific guy, he was also a seasoned news professional who knew how to get things done. (Burt began his career at Fox Movietone News and served as a combat cameraman during World War II.)

  We had held very preliminary conversations with cable operators for more than a year, but it wasn’t until July 1, 1979, that I made the firm decision to launch CNN and we made our public announcement shortly thereafter. I was still concerned about competition and feared that once we made our intentions known, someone might come out of the woodwork, so I wanted to be sure that we pegged a start date that was not far into the future. I was also hoping to compete in the 1980 America’s Cup and knew that the trials would occupy most of that summer. We settled on a launch of June 1, 1980, leaving us just eleven months to get on air.

  One of our first priorities was to find a building. We were already packed tightly in our midtown Atlanta offices and we needed a studio and space for hundreds of new hires. Real estate and construction were not my specialties so I called my lifelong friend and sailing crewmember, Bunky Helfrich. Bunky was living in Hilton Head after a successful career as an architect in Savannah and I asked him to leave his comfortable lifestyle to come to work for me. His charge was to figure out how we were going to build facilities in time to meet our aggressive timetable. I’m sure this wasn’t an easy decision for him, but fortunately for me he said yes.

  Right around that time the Progressive Club, a Jewish country club in midtown Atlanta, had decided to sell their old clubhouse and move north of the city. An abandoned country club might not have been an ideal place from which to start a news network but it was right across the highway from our existing offices and it encompassed about ten acres. Bunky checked it out and while we knew we’d have to be creative, we figured that we could convert the first and second floors to offices and turn the gym and locker rooms in the basement into studio space. Behind the building, in addition to tennis courts and a swimming pool, there was quite a bit of open land (including some still recognizable Civil War bunkers). Reese Schonfeld had explained to me that we would need several satellite receiver dishes to collect incoming feeds and this would be the perfect place to put them. We decided to buy the property and it wasn’t long before construction crews were at work converting a plantation-style clubhouse mansion into the home of television’s first ever twenty-four-hour news service.

  Another timing challenge we faced was the ordering of equipment. With no established news operations we had to start from scratch, purchasing cameras, lights, tape machines, satellite dishes—a huge amount of equipment. The lead times required for ordering some of these items were as long as nine months. We estimated that they would need about a month of rehearsal and run-through time before going on air, meaning that to make a May 1 rehearsal date, we had just one month to make estimates and order everything we were going to need. That huge task fell on the shoulders of our chief engineer, a calm and capable guy named Gene Wright. It was a frantic time but fortunately for us, Gene was up to the task.

  Although I hadn’t watched much television news, I did have some strong opinions about what I wanted CNN to be. While the networks and local news stations seemed to follow a “if it bleeds, it leads,” rule centering their broadcasts on murders, car wrecks, disasters, and the like, I wanted us to do more serious journalism and to go deeper into the more important issues of the day. I also wanted to present the news in an unbiased fashion. At that time, some of the evening anchors, including Walter Cronkite, were injecting their own opinions into the telecasts and I just didn’t like it. Schonfeld and I decided that on CNN, news would be the star, not our on-air people. (Speaking of Cronkite, we did at one point consider trying to hire him or some other name anchor. Each one declined, saying they were tied up with long-term contracts.)

  Reese Schonfeld thought we would benefit from having at least one well-known and credible TV journalist and he convinced the well-respected Daniel Schorr to join our team. Schorr had had a great career at CBS but had left there after a dispute a few years before. He had been doing some stories for ITNA and had a good relationship with Reese. When I met Dan, his biggest concern was that I not tell him what to do or say on the air. He didn’t want me forcing my opinions on him and he didn’t want to be asked to make any commercial endorsements. After I made it clear that these requests were not a problem, Dan signed up with us and made several public appearances on our behalf as we atte
mpted to sell CNN to cable operators and Madison Avenue.

  CNN was still surrounded by skeptics and critics. Many “experts” thought we would never launch, let alone be successful. There was no way we could afford to do it, they claimed, and we certainly didn’t have the journalistic expertise required to do it well. Several questioned the concept, saying there was already plenty of news on television and with print and radio news, consumers had access to all the coverage they could ever want. Some in the news establishment even had issues with our location. The network news divisions were all based in New York and they couldn’t see how an operation like this could be run from a place like Atlanta.

  When I’d hear that, I’d think, “Why not Atlanta? The biggest soft drink company in the world is based there. Procter & Gamble is the world’s biggest soap company and they’re in Cincinnati. Why does everything big have to be based in New York?” My standing with these media elites was just as it had been with the sailing establishment when I started racing, the baseball owners when I bought the Braves, and the Hollywood studios when I launched the SuperStation. Just as it had in the past, my outsider status only made me want to work that much harder and to succeed that much more.

  It was an exciting time. Still working hard to make the SuperStation work we were now adding an operation that was many times more complex and expensive. Once again I would need to be creative with financing the venture and in addition to working on the sale of WRET, I knew we’d have to figure out ways to borrow more money. On top of all that, my sailing career was still in high gear and I had a full schedule during the summer of 1979. In August, I took a break from the office and flew to the U.K. to compete in the world’s most important ocean race—the Fastnet.

  A TED STORY

  “What Do We Do Now?”

  —Bunky Helfrich

  I was visiting Ted and Janie in 1979 for a celebration of their fifteenth wedding anniversary when Ted said to me, “Look, I think I’m going to start this news network. Why don’t you come up and help me with it?” I said, “That sounds great, Ted, do you have any property yet?” He said that he didn’t but toward the end of July he called me about the Progressive Club. He and I went out to look at it and while I thought we could make it work, getting it all ready to be on air by June of 1980 would be an incredible task.

  My main contact on this project was Reese Schonfeld. We got a lot accomplished in a short period of time, despite the fact that he was under contract with someone else for our first few months together. I remember even having to meet him at the airport a couple of times. Ted had a vision for what he called an “open newsroom” for CNN—a setup where the audience could see everything going on to put the newscast together. A lot of people thought this would never work but Reese said that there was already a station in Vancouver that was using one. In August, he and I flew out there to check it out.

  I knew that Ted was over in Europe for the Fastnet race (I might have been on his crew had I not been so busy with CNN) but I was startled when the news station in Vancouver broke in with a story about it. There had been a bad storm. An unknown number of sailors had been killed and the word was that Ted Turner was one of them.

  Reese looked at me and said, “What do we do now?”

  And I said, “Damned if I know.”

  14

  Fastnet

  Just as our planning for CNN kicked into high gear it was time for me to go to Great Britain for a week of racing. By this point—August of 1979—we had assembled enough of the key CNN management team that things would move along in my absence. Plus, I really wanted to win the Fastnet Race.

  The Fastnet is the final of a series of competitions known as Cowes Week, named for its home base of Cowes village, on the Isle of Wight, which is located on the southern coast of England. This is the place where sailboat racing began—the sport’s equivalent to baseball’s Cooperstown. I would be leading a crew on Tenacious, an Olin Stephens–designed yacht that I bought in the mid-1970s. The Fastnet was a different kind of race from the America’s Cup. In Newport, you competed against a small number of boats in a series of shorter races, but Fastnet was a long 605-mile ocean race with a field of more than three hundred competing yachts. I had competed well here before but never took home first prize. Winning the America’s Cup and Fastnet would be comparable to taking the Olympic gold medal in both the marathon and the 100 meters, and I was eager to win it.

  I had great confidence in Tenacious and, as always, I needed a strong crew. I couldn’t simply reassemble our America’s Cup team since that kind of match racing and open ocean competitions like the Fastnet attract different types of sailors. One guy who was great at both kinds was Gary Jobson. Since serving as my tactician on Courageous, he had raced with me on Tenacious for the last couple of years, but as Fastnet drew closer, Gary decided he needed to skip it. The full Cowes Week was a significant time commitment and my crews still had to pay their own way. But Gary and I had become a team and I really wanted him there, so as the event drew closer I decided to call him up and ask him one more time. I reminded him of the fun we’d had winning the America’s Cup and explained that I didn’t think I could win the Fastnet without him. Gary finally relented and agreed to come.

  Working together, Gary and I put together a great crew. Two of the less experienced among them was my then sixteen-year-old son, Teddy, and a guy named Christian Williams, a newspaper reporter who was writing a book about me. Teddy was spending the summer working on various crews and Williams thought it might be helpful for his research to see me in action on a boat. Including me, there were eighteen men in the crew and one woman. (Jane Potts was the sister of one of our crew and served as our cook—a very important job in a multiday event like this!) Each one knew what he was doing and after just two days of practice we were ready for Cowes Week. We won enough races that week to be awarded the Queen’s Cup—a prize given to the best-performing boat in the series. With one day off before Fastnet, I took the crew over to Portsmouth to see Victory, which had been Lord Nelson’s flagship. I wanted to visit it not only because I enjoyed maritime military history but I also thought it would give us all some great motivation going into what would be a long, hard race together.

  A TED STORY

  “Ocean Racing Isn’t Baby-Sitting”

  —Teddy Turner

  Because of our family dynamic at the time—mainly the issues some of us were having with Janie—I got to spend a lot of summers on my dad’s boats. Starting when I was about six I would go out with the crew and do a bunch of the deliveries—the trips you took when you had to get the boat from one race to the next. It was almost like “Turner Summer Camp” out on the water with an interesting bunch of young guys running a sailboat. In truth, I never got to spend much time with Dad because when he’d come in for the races, I’d have to get off the boat. He wouldn’t let me race with him until I was fifteen and I was almost sixteen the first time I raced offshore. By then I’d already done thousands of miles on the ocean and he was comfortable having me aboard. His theory was that ocean racing isn’t baby-sitting. He’d say that to put me on the crew, he’d have to take someone off and I couldn’t go on until I was experienced enough to pull my own weight. So I started racing in the spring of 1979 and spent that spring and summer on and off the boat the entire time and ended up doing the Fastnet Race.

  From the Fastnet Race starting line in Cowes, contestants sail in a southwesterly direction through the English Channel, and then turn to the northwest to cross the Irish Sea. Boats then circle Fastnet Rock, off the southwestern tip of Ireland, and roughly retrace the course back to the finish line in Plymouth, England. The entire course distance of 605 miles can, depending on conditions, take three to five days to complete. In 1979, 303 boats entered the race. Unlike the America’s Cup where all the yachts are of roughly the same size, in Fastnet boats as small as twenty-eight feet competed against others as large as eighty feet. To balance the competition, the larger (faster) boats are given a handicap, w
ith several hours added to their time.

  In 1971, for example, I set a course record for Fastnet but still didn’t win first prize. A smaller boat that finished after me was declared the winner after the handicap was added to my time. The start of the race was also staggered. Yachts were sent off over the course of an hour in six divisions at ten-minute intervals. These groupings were determined by boat length, with the larger boats placed in the rear and smaller ones in front. At sixty-one feet, Tenacious was toward the larger end of the scale. Our boat size would not only help us move quickly through the water, it would also give us an advantage should the conditions turn rough. At the start—1:30 P.M. on Saturday, August 11—the weather was fine, and while the long-range forecast called for some wind and possibly rain, conditions were not a concern.

  As with all ocean races, we split into two watches, each one managing the boat for four hours at a time. Gary Jobson and I had been by each other’s side in the America’s Cup, but here he served as captain of one of our watches, while another good friend and experienced seaman named Jim Mattingly served as the other. We collaborated on tactical decisions as we took turns steering the boat. Because of the handicap system and the extended length of the course it’s impossible to know precisely where you stand in an event like this, but forty-eight hours into the race, as we moved closer to Fastnet Rock, we knew we were doing well. The crew was working together and Jane Potts kept everyone happily fed. I was eager to break my course record and win the race, and halfway through the contest I thought we had a chance to do both.

  Peter Bowker was our navigator and part of his job was to retrieve and interpret the weather updates we received over the radio. About the time that we were turning Fastnet Rock, Bowker relayed a report that a low pressure system was coming in from the North Atlantic and a major storm would hit us sometime that night. They were calling for Force 7 or 8 winds, possibly reaching Force 9 in some locations—hurricane conditions. In addition to considering what this meant for Tenacious and trying to prepare myself mentally for the storm, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that there were more than three hundred boats in this race and some of them were far too small for a storm of this magnitude. While I felt we’d be all right, I predicted to my crew that twenty men would die that night.