Up All Night

by Lisa Napoli

  Nearly four thousand conventioneers jammed the Disneyland Hotel for the largest of these gatherings to date—half attendees and half exhibitors, all eager to seize a piece of what an ad in a trade magazine declared were “the three biggest words in television: Cable, cable, cable.” The cautious interest had roared into a gold-rush stampede. Programmers hawked their services, all evidence of the focused narrowcasting cable could allow—an all-sports channel called ESPN, a public service channel called C-SPAN, forays into highfalutin arts programming from broadcasters CBS and ABC, which promised theatrical programming that would never fly on mainstream TV.

  Also on display: a revolutionary new technology that would allow cable operators to provide customers an unheard-of fifty-two channels! Satellite dishes kept shrinking in size and price, making it possible for still more cable operators to join the revolution. One day in the not-too-distant future, the cord would be fully cut, with the arrival of personal dishes installed in one’s home.

  As the regulatory “gobbledegook” continued to tilt in cable’s favor, cities and suburbs around the nation frantically sought bids from companies that wished to wire their municipalities for service. Other topics on the wide-ranging agenda included the continuing drama over complex, thorny issues like copyright and advertiser skepticism of this emerging medium.

  All of the chatter quickly subsided as news of a mysterious and devastating development swept the convention floor. RCA’s Satcom 3 had gone missing. The bird should have been safely in place by the time the trade show doors opened. But as it was about to ascend to its permanent orbit, it had simply vanished. The apogee kick motor that would push it into its final orbit had failed.

  Missing? Ted asked, incredulous. Well, that’s RCA’s problem. As a charter customer, surely he’d be fine. There had to be a backup bird or someone who could do something, he observed, like when your car didn’t start.

  The trouble was that the “someone”—in this case, skilled engineers overwhelmed by a “deep sense of doom”—didn’t know what to do; nor could they explain what had become of their $50 million satellite, much less what happened next. RCA’s next Satcom wasn’t set to launch for eighteen months, and already that one was fully reserved. Even powerful radar that could detect basketballs from twenty thousand miles away couldn’t locate this box-shaped ton of technology.

  “We are searching the heavens,” RCA vice president Robert Shortal said. “Other companies with satellites are searching the heavens. The United States Air Force is searching the heavens. We honestly don’t know what happened. For all we know, it’s on its way to Mars.” Had space aliens captured Satcom? Did this mean Jupiter was receiving I Love Lucy reruns? “Cable TV’s Bye-Bye Birdie,” joked the Washington Post’s Tom Shales. “Keep watching the skies!”

  As the harsh reality of the loss and its implications became clear, Ted quipped to an audience at the show that he must have lived through the Fastnet disaster so he could witness this new one—though this new disaster might very well prove his demise. The networks must have shot down Satcom, he postulated, just to undo him.

  The gallows humor masked his terror. Everything he had was riding on the news channel. If he couldn’t launch on time, his entire business would collapse. Still, Ted went ahead with a planned major announcement. The network had managed to land its first advertiser, Bristol-Myers, based on CNN’s dazzling promise to deliver half of all cable subscribers as their prospective audience. The pharmaceutical giant had pledged $25 million over ten years to sponsor consumer medical segments. Considering that commercials on the nightly network newscasts commanded $50,000 each, what amounted to sixty bucks a spot for CNN was hardly a coup. The investment was a crucial show of faith that signaled that someone other than Ted believed in CNN. Even the guys behind the Ginsu Knife, who’d made a fortune advertising that and other direct-mail products on channel 17, had refused to invest in Ted’s crazy idea: “Who the heck will watch news twenty-four hours a day?”

  The Bristol deal had almost skidded when executives demanded editorial control over the segments, which Reese refused to give. Then, the would-be advertiser insisted on approving the on-air talent who’d deliver the medical segments. “I can’t do that,” the newsman explained. “You’ll have to trust me—you’ll never, never have to be concerned about the credibility of a newscaster.” They relented.

  No amount of advertising would matter if Satcom couldn’t be found. Media swarmed to the parking lot of RCA Americom in Vernon Valley, New York, eager for the latest word.

  Back in Atlanta, the skeletal staff couldn’t mask their distress. You didn’t have to know a thing about cruciform and spin precession maneuvers to understand this was trouble. Reese had an impossible time spinning the silver lining of this obstacle. He was sure they were a goner. Why would anyone upend their lives now to join CNN when it was in such limbo? Cable operators who already thought Ted was “looney tunes” would never waste their limited channel space on CNN now. Who would ever lend Ted the money he needed to keep up operations until there was enough revenue coming in? The precariousness of the Turnerverse now became clear to Reese. He’d been sure Ted’s financials wouldn’t possibly be an issue. He’d been wrong.

  Ted set about calming the troops, ordering them to continue hiring, full steam ahead. “We will not be stopped! No matter what it costs, we’re gonna go on!” he said, brandishing his sword before a roomful of worried broadcasters before heading off to another yacht race in the Bahamas.

  On his boat in the gleaming waters around Nassau, Ted soon received even worse news. RCA had revealed a solution to the missing satellite—and the solution was a disaster. The company planned to rent time for its aggrieved Satcom 3 customers on a competing bird. Yes, there were two empty channels on the existing Satcom 1, but that wasn’t enough to accommodate all the stranded customers—including the new National Christian Network; a new Time-Life service featuring BBC programming; an entertainment service called Showtime; a super-station out of New York, WOR; and a network for people over the age of fifty called Prime Time. So instead, in the interest of being equitable, all would be rented space on another company’s bird.

  This wasn’t like an airline booking you on a rival carrier when your flight got canceled. What RCA proposed was like offering up an eight-track tape machine on which to play an LP when your turntable died. Having to debut on another satellite meant CNN would launch, out of the gate, into instant obscurity. The earth receiving stations were not interchangeable. Most of the dishes cable companies had bought could only pull down signals from RCA’s birds because that’s where HBO and channel 17 were. It was highly unlikely they’d invest in an entirely new receiving station. Ted hastily departed from Nassau, collected his team in Atlanta, and headed to New York, loaded for bear.

  At RCA’s headquarters high above in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, an executive explained that Ted would just have to live with the decision—the space on the existing satellites was off-limits.

  With that casual dismissal of his dire conundrum, Ted flew into an uncontrollable rage. He pulled the man by his shirt collar and erupted into a tirade for twenty minutes straight—the “Rasputin Mad Monk” routine, as his young executive, Terry McGuirk, described it. He had staked his own personal fortune on CNN. He was a charter customer! He had helped put them on the map! What about the people he’d hired away from other networks, who’d left secure jobs, who he’d now have to fire? Was RCA, parent of NBC, intentionally screwing him? His mother was so distressed about this, she’d had to have a hysterectomy! There were just ninety days to go till CNN’s planned debut, and if he couldn’t launch on schedule, it would be a disaster. A catastrophe! His ruin!

  “I’m a small company, and you guys may put me out of business. This is my death if you do this to me. This is my blood you’re getting. For every drop of blood I shed,” he roared, “you will shed a barrel.”

  If he was going down, RCA was going down with him. He intended to sue them and blast them to smithereen
s.

  Go ahead, they said, calmly and clearly. “We can’t give you a transponder if we’re denying one to everyone else, but if you sue us and win, we’ll be forced to give it to you.”

  So, on February 28, 1980, Turner Broadcasting filed suit against RCA for $35 million, asking for an immediate injunction that would guarantee CNN a spot on Satcom 1. And while they waited for a verdict, a new heart-stopper of a problem emerged.

  The tens of millions of dollars he was counting on from the sale of his station in Charlotte was now in jeopardy.

  As soon as Ted had announced plans to sell WRET in order to finance CNN, several eager prospective buyers emerged. Ted’s finance officer, Will Sanders, coaxed up broadcaster Westinghouse’s offer to an eye-popping $20 million—the largest sum ever commanded by a UHF station. The lunatic fringe didn’t seem so crazy anymore.

  As the station’s fortunes had soared over the decade, Ted, as promised, had dutifully paid back the donations viewers had doled out in response to the televised beg-a-thon—with interest. (The most devoted viewers refused to accept the money, happy to have invested in a winner.)

  But a lingering scar marred WRET’s standing with the FCC. A group called the Charlotte Coalition had called out station management for “insensitivity in programming and discrimination in hiring and promotion.” Coalition activists had requested that the station’s license to operate be revoked. Though it hadn’t been, the government had renewed it only on a limited basis.

  When WRET had added a newscast to its programming, another incident had lengthened the station’s bad report card.2 A job offer made to a black woman hired for an on-air slot as a weathercaster had been rescinded because someone in management worried Charlotte wasn’t ready for a newscaster of color. Naturally, she’d filed a complaint.

  Because of sanctions imposed on the station, Ted couldn’t sell until its record was clean and he was deemed a fit broadcaster. Given this complication and delay, Westinghouse threatened to scrub the sale.

  And that had a cascading effect. Anticipating the cash infusion to come once the sale was complete, Ted had secured a $20 million line of credit against which he’d already borrowed $12 million. Now that the transaction was in limbo, the loan had been called, at an interest rate of 25 percent—$400,000 a month.

  Now, he lamented, he found himself just about flat broke. Reese felt as if he’d been conned. He had no idea how precarious Ted’s finances were.

  Desperate, he arranged a meeting in Charlotte with the local activist group. He brought along with him a baseball superstar, the home run king, Hank Aaron, currently serving as vice president in charge of the Braves’ farm teams.

  Ted began by apologizing for the past bad behavior of WRET’s management. He took full responsibility for their actions.

  “You know, I don’t blame you guys for being mad at me. I’d be mad at me, too,” he told them, gesturing toward the legal team. “It looks like you got the same problem I’ve got in my company. You don’t have any blacks in high places either. You got three guys here who are doin’ all the talking—and they’re all white.”

  With that, Ted fell to his hands and knees to underscore his contrition and begged.

  “You gotta let me sell this station, or I’m a goner.”

  The soft-spoken Aaron backed him up, pointing out that Ted had pioneered the promotion of blacks in baseball, like him and the late Bill Lucas, to managerial roles. Ted talked frequently of his brotherly love for Jimmy Brown, a black man hired by his father decades before who’d continued to work for the family.3 “This guy isn’t prejudiced,” Aaron assured them.

  A deal was brokered: Ted agreed to fund $400,000 worth of grants to minority groups, internships, and scholarships at several historically black institutions of higher learning. It was a worthy chunk of cash to allow the sale to proceed.

  * * *

  To be invited to speak before the top editors of the august New York Times was a sign of acceptance by the vaunted media establishment Ted reviled. The walls of the paper’s boardroom were lined with pictures of esteemed visitors who’d graced the room for the weekly publisher’s lunch. Nineteen presidents had spoken before this group, along with luminaries like Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks.

  Now, Ted was to join these illustrious ranks.

  To help bolster Ted’s image among the New York media elite, Reese had hired a former CBS public relations man named Ben Kubasik. So far, it hadn’t helped. Ted had managed to offend just about everyone in the audience when he’d appeared recently at the New York Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Before a roomful of broadcasters, in a speech Reese described as Ted’s “brilliant best and off-the-wall worst,” he lamented the bygone days of more genteel programming and explained that the reason he’d gone into TV was because they were doing such a lousy job.

  “Unless television changes a lot in the eighties, this nation isn’t going to be around the way it is today,” he told them. “No one industry or one group of individuals is as guilty for the demise of this country as the television networks and over-the-air broadcast stations—the cartel that has been feeding us so much garbage for such a long period of time.”

  When star reporter Gabe Pressman raised his hand to ask Ted’s definition of good local news, Ted asked where he worked.

  “WNEW,” came the reply. Mad Dog Kavanau’s old station!

  “That’s a tabloid station, and you’re a yellow journalist,” Ted countered.

  The event devolved into a bit of a brawl as WNEW’s current news director leapt to Pressman’s defense.

  “You’re talking about the most respected reporter in New York!” shouted Mark Monsky, a former colleague of both Reese and Kavanau. Monsky and the ITNA were preparing their own salvo in the news wars, a half-hour nightly newscast that would appear on half the nation’s television sets—a potential forty million viewers on thirty stations. The Independent Network News would begin airing the week after CNN debuted.

  Yet another colleague rose and began attacking Ted’s lampoon of the news on channel 17.

  Riling up a bunch of local television brethren in New York was one sort of poor showing. But screwing up an audience with the newspaper of record could have disastrous consequences. If the paper wrote a scathing take on Ted, his bad behavior, and CNN before it even launched, they’d be toast.

  That day at the Times, Ted’s handlers advised him to table the attitude and stick to the notes.

  As they walked into the beige marble lobby of the Grey Lady, as the respected, starched paragon of journalistic integrity was called, Ted demanded of Kubasik, “What the hell am I doing here?” Emblazoned in bronze letters on the wall was the newspaper’s slogan: TO GIVE THE NEWS IMPARTIALLY, WITHOUT FEAR OR FAVOR, REGARDLESS OF ANY PARTY, SECT OR INTEREST INVOLVED. Ted and company made their way up to the private dining room high up in the building. The Mouth of the South kicked into drawling overdrive.

  “Don’t you know we are going to bury you?” Ted asked the men who ran the world’s most influential newspaper. It was no secret that newspapers were in a state of flux in the face of the expanding television universe and widening expectations for faster news delivery. Rising costs of labor and newsprint were hammering the industry. Circulation at the Times had been declining, as it had at other papers. To bolster relevancy and readership, editors had been adding new lifestyle-oriented sections like “Living” and “Weekend,” though it had recently tabled a planned national edition.

  “You are putting out a paper tomorrow,” Ted taunted, “and we’re putting our news out for today.” Newspapers were simply out-of-date—unsustainable!

  First, he pontificated, you’ve got to buy a whole lot of land in Canada and plant tree seeds on it. Then you wait around for ten or twelve years to let those trees grow. Then you cut them down and truck the logs to a sawmill, then turn them into pulp and newsprint. Then you load those giant rolls onto a truck, carry them to New York City, and unload them int
o the heart of Times Square. Then gangs of union workers load them onto the printing presses, while the printers bang out type on linotype machines to make plates for the presses. They crank up the press runs, then load stacks of newspaper bundles on dozens of trucks and fight traffic to distribute them to tens of thousands of individual apartments, houses, vendors, and airports over hundreds of square miles and across the country.

  “We,” he concluded, flashing his broad, winning grin, “do that whole process of getting news to our viewers by pressing a single button!”

  But, an editor asked, what was this Cable News Network going to do that the networks hadn’t done?

  “We’re going to do live news and more live news like it has never been done before,” said Ted, parroting Reese’s vision.

  “But in reality, aren’t you going to wind up covering a lot of little, two-alarm fires that don’t amount to anything?” another editor asked.

  Reese fielded that one. “Until the fire is over, no one knows whether it’s a one-alarm fire or the one that burned down Chicago,” he answered confidently. “What we want to sell in terms of live coverage is a role in the process for our viewers.”

  “Awwwright!” Ted cheered. “Strong!”

  No advance story on the new network made it into the paper. Perhaps it was because the Times didn’t wish to hasten a discussion of the demise of print, or perhaps the editors simply found themselves perplexed, as so many did, by Ted Turner.

  * * *

  It was in March, ninety days before launch, when CNN won a merciful reprieve. A federal court ruled that Ted did have the right to one of those empty transponders on Satcom 1—but only for six months. To boast about the victory, Ted called a press conference at the budding Tara on Techwood—conveniently omitting the six-months part. Visiting journalists wore hard hats adorned with the CNN logo as they toured the facilities and heard Ted preen about his emerging facilities. It was hard to imagine this place would be ready for showtime by June.