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Ted Turner Interview (page: 3 / 7)Founder, Cable News Network
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 Print Interview
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Where were you when that first Gulf War started and we all watched it on CNN?
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Ted Turner: It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I knew what was coming. We knew that the attack was coming imminently because we had been warned by the State Department. Even the President called the president of the network and strongly recommended that we get our people out of Baghdad, but I made the decisions that -- as long as they would volunteer to stay -- that they could stay. We were freedom of the press, we were going to get the story. I was in Jane Fonda's room. She was working, and I had the afternoon off, and it was, I don't know, about 5:00 or 6 o'clock East Coast time and two o'clock West Coast, and I was watching CNN, and the war started. I flipped over to KCBS and Dan Rather was in the studio talking, and I flipped over to NBC and Tom Brokaw was in the studio talking, and I flipped over to ABC and Peter Jennings was in the studio talking, and I flipped over to CNN, and the tracer bullets were going and the rockets were getting shot down, and I said, "Yippee! This is the greatest scoop in the history of journalism!" and it still is the greatest scoop, and one network had the start of the war from behind enemy lines.
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The Iraqis didn't see us as enemies because we had already started the war report. Their chief executives had been over to Atlanta. They were hooked in and affiliated with us on stories from Iraq, and they got a lot of stories from us to run in their local Iraqi newscasts, and we had done this all over the world. So I built up a system. You know, ABC, NBC, and CBS, they'd come into these countries once in a while, but we were there all the time. We were there all the time, and we had material that they wanted, because any time the Pope said anything important, we ran it. Any time the President of the Soviet Union said anything, we had it. So if they just had a satellite dish at their network in Baghdad, or whatever it was -- Tokyo -- and they had made arrangements with us... When I first got to Japan, I went around to the Japanese broadcasters, and I said, "CNN for not many yen." I sold it there. I sold it everywhere.
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Do you think that the major networks decided to just let you have the international stories? They cut back their foreign correspondents and trashed their foreign bureaus right around that time.
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Ted Turner: With news, the more local you are, the more interest there is. People are more interested in their neighborhood than the other side of the world. They are more interested in their district and their city and their state and their country than they are the other side of the world. But what you don't have to do is appeal to everybody. In fact nowadays, with 100 channels in cable TV, you can see anything you want to, basically. So it's become a medium of choice, rather than a medium where you just sit there with a mass audience, sit there and watch Milton Berle or Johnny Carson, and I helped make that happen. I helped set people free.
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We all thank you. Biographers talk about your unrelenting desire to be the first to do something. What is the mind set you have to have to create something from scratch?
Ted Turner: You have to have a lot of courage, and you have to have a lot of imagination. You can do a lot of things from scratch that aren't going to work out. I can tell you how I did it. I spent a lot of time thinking. I had done a lot of reading, and when I had spare time, a lot of times I would just think and not waste my time watching TV. I watched very little television growing up, hardly any at all. Your mind is just like any other muscle in your body. If you want to have a sharp mind, you need to use it. Just like if you want to have strong muscles, you better work out a lot, so I worked my mind out all the time, and then when I needed it, I would put it to use. Like developing CNN, for instance...
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I asked myself where the threat's going to come. Once CNN is on the air and people see it's going to be successful, where is the next threat going to come from? And I said the threat is going to come from a right wing news network, and it was 18 years later before Fox got started, 18 years. We had that, and by then I was making so much money and doing so well, because the way I was going to counteract Fox was -- I had two networks, CNN and Headline News, and I could say, "Well, I'll just turn Headline News into the rightest wing network you ever saw and preempt Fox, and there will be no real reason for people to tune into it." But when the time came and Fox got started, I was so successful. I was worth billions, where I had been worth nothing at the beginning. I liked being straightforward with the news. Something with my name on it, I couldn't do a right wing network. I said they can just have whatever they want with it, and we'll stick to what we've been doing, being the world's most respected news network. Like The New York Times. The New York Times doesn't try and mimic the Post, not really. They stand there, and I give them credit. I wanted to be The New York Times of the television news business.
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[ Key to Success ] Integrity |
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Since your departure, do you think that CNN has dumbed down to some extent, in response to Fox's success?
Ted Turner: Yes. Yes. I think CNN still, when they're at their best and when they're doing serious journalism, they're hard to beat, but they definitely responded to the ratings. Particularly, Headline News. To me, Headline News in prime time now with Glenn Beck, I never watch it. I just can't watch it. It's just opinions. It's just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But Larry King is still there, pretty much doing the same thing. Headline News in the morning, they haven't changed the format much on it. They have gone a little more tabloid, but then, whenever you sell or merge your company -- I made a mistake doing it.
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The mistake I made was losing control of the company. But I didn't plan for that, just everything went wrong. But in a way, that was good, too, because I had had so much success for so long, and I didn't get the big head, but I did perhaps overestimate just how much strength that I would have with the Time Warner merger. As long as it was just Time Warner, I had seven or eight percent of the company when I merged with Time Warner, but when we merged with AOL, I went down to three percent, and that is when they phased me out. I got laid off in a restructuring, but that's okay.
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I got in the restaurant business. I had always wanted to do that, and I'm enjoying that.
You got into the philanthropy business, too.
Ted Turner: That's right. I did. I don't consider that a business, it's philanthropy. It stands on its own, and I really have enjoyed that a lot. If I had still had my job at Turner Broadcasting, I wouldn't have gotten into the philanthropy to the extent that I have, probably not as early as I did, and that's been very, very satisfying.
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If something happens to you that breaks your heart, that's not going to do you or anybody any good. What you've got to do is shake it off, and just like if you're playing for a baseball team. You get beat on Friday? Well, you know you got Saturday and Sunday, and if you get beat on Saturday and Sunday, well, there's Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And if you get beat all year like the Braves -- the first four years I owned them, they came in last every time in their division, and set a record that stands today with the most consecutive last place finishes since divisional play was started. But I didn't quit. And 18 years later, I won the World Series, and we had the best team in the history of sports. For 13 consecutive years, we won our division.
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[ Key to Success ] Perseverance |
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Nobody has ever done that in hockey, football, you name it.
Ted Turner Interview, Page:
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This page last revised on Nov 20, 2007 19:05 EST
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