Ted Turner Interview (page: 6 / 7) Founder, Cable News Network	Print Interview

After your father died, how did you establish yourself and stabilize the business?

Ted Turner: Well, it was a long, long story.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I got some of the advertisers that leased the billboards over a year's period of time to prepay me, for a discount, and I sold some stock to some of the employees. I had already worked at the company for 12 years, at different parts of it. So I knew the billboard business inside and out when I was 24 years old. My father had explained how it worked to me over the years and I hit the ground running because I had already had the experience of most 40-year-old people when I was 24.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Did people trust you because they'd known you for so long?

Ted Turner: It wasn't that they trusted me. I was an unknown, because at the time I was working as a branch manager. I had to prove myself, and it took some time to build up my own credibility.

Would you say you had confidence in yourself?

Ted Turner: Absolutely.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I'd had all of the experience. I knew the business inside and out, and I had worked hard at it and studied it. It was relatively easy. It was much simpler to understand. Basically, with billboards, you go out and lease the location. In those days, we tried to pay $25 a year for a location, and then you put the billboard up, and then you went and rented it to an advertiser for $25 a month, and you maintained it. You made sure that the lights were burning at night, and that the weeds were cut in front of it and it was maintained, and hopefully, between your income and your outgo, if you could keep your signs leased most of the time, you'd make a profit. That was it. It's very simple. The television business was much more complicated because of satellite and cable TV that were brand new when I got into the business. No one had really utilized them very much, hardly at all.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Tell us how you got started in the television business. You bought an Atlanta TV station, WJRJ, that was losing a lot of money. What were you thinking?

Ted Turner: Before I did that, I went into radio actually. I bought and merged with five radio stations, because I didn't have enough money to buy a television station at that point, and I didn't even know what UHF television was.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We had in Atlanta four VHF stations, the commercial stations, and then this UHF station popped up somewhere, and I heard that it was about to go broke because nobody could get UHF in those days. There was no cable TV, except in small towns where they brought television to people that lived too far from a big city to get over-the-air television. At that time, I figured that television was really on the move, and growing much faster because it was new. This was in the '60s. Television was relatively new, and color television was really just starting too, and I figured a television that nobody could see, I jokingly said, "A television nobody could see would be easier to sell than billboards, because nobody could see, or hardly anybody." Then I went out and told the advertisers that our viewers are more intelligent than the network viewers, and they said, "Why?" I said, "Because you have to be a genius to figure out how to get UHF!" So the people we had had to be real smart to figure out how to get the special antenna and how to hook it up and twist it around, so they could get a signal. That's pretty much true, too.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

You started buying old movies and adding them to the station's programming. What was the idea?

Ted Turner: They were already running some old movies, but I put a little more emphasis on movies. I liked them personally, and even an old movie, a lot of times, had great production value and great actors and so forth, because they were made for the theater. Even though people had an opportunity to see the old movies when they were in the theaters, as opposed to the television shows that premiered on television, we couldn't afford first-run shows. So we ran a lot of movies.

Of course, back then, people didn't have DVDs or videos to rent.

Ted Turner: That's right. It was before there was DVD, before there was video. I can remember, when I started in the business, the news cameras mainly used film. Videotape was just coming in, and the smallest they made was two inches. Obviously, that's too big for VHS, but then VHS came along.

We want to talk a little bit about your philanthropy because it has been so extraordinary in recent years. What made you decide to pour so much of your resources into the United Nations?

Ted Turner: Because it needed it. That's where the biggest problems are in the world, in the developing world.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In the United States, we're so fortunate, and most people don't even realize just how lucky we are, because the media in the country doesn't -- I mean, they'll run a few photographs of Darfur, but we don't see the suffering much anymore because the newscasters know -- I know when we ran programs about the suffering in the Third World, we could see the Nielsen meters turn. People didn't want to see it. So basically, the networks don't run it anymore, just like they hardly run news about what the casualties are in Iraq. It's unfortunate I think, because the world is so complicated, complex -- and with nuclear weapons, so dangerous -- that we need to have a citizenry that is well informed. But you can't make people watch something that they don't want to watch or read something that they don't want to read, and we get an awful lot of these serial killers and murderers, because people are bizarrely attracted to bizarre behavior. It's just depressing to me because I don't consider that news. I consider that sensationalism.

I don't really need to know or want to know about some sniper that killed six kids and then shoots himself. Today, the story is about the guy that shot himself in the head three times before he killed himself. That's hard to do. Usually, you can only shoot yourself in the head once. He must have had bad aim.

In 1997, you walked into Kofi Annan's office and told him what you were going to do. Could you tell us about that?

Ted Turner: I didn't want him to be shocked the next night. I knew he was going to be at the United Nations Association dinner, and...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was going to be honored as the man who made the greatest contributions to the UN that year in the United States, and I wanted to have something to say, and I figured that on my way to New York -- I was waiting for the last minute to work on my speech. I said, "What are you going to say, Turner?" I said, "Well..." because the U.S. was about a billion dollars in arrears. We hadn't paid our debt for two years, and it was about a billion dollars. I said, "Well, why don't you just give a billion dollars to the UN," and I'll just make up for what the U.S. didn't pay. You know, step forward, like if your uncle doesn't pay his bills down at the grocery store, you pay them for him. So that's what I decided to do.

Your uncle doesn't usually run up a debt of a billion dollars, though.

Ted Turner: I was worth three billion at the time, and I gave away over half of what I had, because I gave another half a billion to other causes, too.

It's been said that your gift to the UN shamed your fellow billionaires into giving, and that had a great effect in itself.

Ted Turner: I don't like to the use the word "shamed." Inspired certainly, certainly better. There's no way of knowing whether that's true or not, and it doesn't really matter, but charitable giving in the United States has increased dramatically. I personally think that's good, because we have so many people that have made just tons of money, and you can't really spend billions of dollars intelligently on yourself, although people like Larry Ellison try. He has, I think, spent over a billion dollars on himself. He's got a 500-foot yacht now that's bigger than an ocean liner. It's supposed to have like 100 people that work on it, and he probably takes one couple out with him most of the time. So there's four people being waited on by 100. It's kind of silly.

You've said that the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans can sometimes have the ill effect of keeping people competitive instead of giving more.

Ted Turner: I said we needed to have a list of the biggest givers, not just the richest people, and Slate has done that, Fortune magazine did it, and it did help giving, because a lot of these guys just want to be on a list somewhere. They want to see their name in a magazine. What's wrong with that? Most of us are that way. Most of us would like to be a movie star, even if we aren't. Right? Wouldn't you rather be Paris Hilton?

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