by Lisa Napoli
Who was watching, anyway, especially during the daytime? A television positioned anywhere other than a living room, bar, or appliance store was as uncommon a vision as a two-dollar bill. A television hooked up to cable, even rarer. Less than a year after CNN had gone on the air, eighteen million homes—still not 40 percent of the country—were wired. A little over six million of those sets were able to receive CNN. Cable service had yet to arrive in the nation’s capital city.
To overcome that gap, Ted had been gifting satellites around the capital city like hard candies, so that the influencers at the White House, Congress, and the National Press Club could tune in. He’d even installed one on Dan Schorr’s lawn. (Dish size and price continued to plunge, and the person who had everything could order one up, fully installed, from the Neiman-Marcus catalog for a mere $36,500.)
The lavish gift to Schorr almost compensated for the time that a studio light exploded while he was on the air, igniting his pants. The endless parade of gaffes continued—revving chainsaws and cleaning crews emptying trash bins as the anchors read the news, to a switching error that transmitted a porn channel on CNN’s airwaves for a painfully long few seconds. The bush-league errors, technological or human or both, never ended. Such was the nature of live television.
Shit, apparently, did flow downhill. During the inauguration of President Reagan, Reese—not realizing his staff was about to dump out of a commercial break to a live feed of the release of the long-held American hostages in Iran—threw up his arms in a full-bore CNN salute and shouted, audible to all, “You prime assholes get that off the air.” That was one for the blooper reel—and a reminder to everyone to modulate their sound.
Perhaps the grandest mistake to date had involved a brilliant idea Reese had cooked up involving the final presidential debate in October 1980. While President Carter and Governor Ronald Reagan prepared for their face-off in Cleveland, the independent candidate, John Anderson, ascended the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington, thousands of miles from the main event, to participate in Reese’s alternative, made possible by a suite of new technology.
The congressman from Illinois had roiled the political applecart with his wildly popular candidacy. He’d polled so well that he’d been invited to appear in the first presidential debate a month earlier. Dismissing Anderson as “primarily a creation of the press,” President Carter refused to participate. Governor Reagan fared so well one-on-one against Representative Anderson that the independent’s standing plunged. As a result, he’d not received an invitation to the second match.
In this new era of videotape and satellite trucks, Reese decided, why not give the maverick a platform? Daniel Schorr played the role of moderator—with the help of a stenographer, who transcribed the questions posed in Cleveland and passed them along.
It sounded like a grand idea—until it went awry. In a hulking satellite truck stationed behind the hall, four producers recorded Carter’s and Reagan’s answers on tape and cut them as quickly as possible so they could play inside the hall and prompt Anderson’s retort.2 But when a tape operator paused to flirt with one of the producers, the system fell apart. Questions were replayed out of order, and the answers didn’t match.
Schorr punted, apologizing, and was grateful that CNN was so invisible many of his friends thought he’d retired. But Anderson’s enterprising campaign manager blew his cover. For maximum exposure, he’d made a deal to rebroadcast the experimental debate on PBS, where a far larger audience could witness his candidate’s performance. The potential audience for the botched production CNN wished to forget numbered in the millions.
* * *
While Ted Turner basked in his belief that CNN was a “smash success,” the network continued to teeter on shaky financial ground, bleeding $2 million a month and often struggling to make payroll.
Employees whispered that revenue from the Braves concession stand was helping to bolster the never-ending budget shortfall. Borrowing a page from his Charlotte days, Ted even took to WTBS to hawk five-for-a-dollar bumper stickers that declared, “I SUPPORT CNN.”
It was time to dig into the piggy bank. A few years earlier, when gold cost $275 an ounce, Ted had invested $2 million in Krugerrands, gold coins from South Africa. He’d taken to carrying one of the glinting coins in his pocket, showing it off by flipping it casually, as if it were a quarter. Now, gold’s value had soared to $800 an ounce, and Ted was desperate for a cash infusion; the precious metal might help him get by—for a moment or two. The only trouble was remembering the combination to the safe where he’d stashed the loot. It had to be drilled open.
Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg didn’t realize how correctly he’d assessed it in when he described CNN as a flimsy, carefully wrapped sham: “Several $100 bills are on the outside, but the rest of the roll is wadded paper.”
So dire was the financial picture that Ted even entertained the previously unimaginable: an alliance with one of the big three broadcasters he reviled. Lately, he’d revived his crusade against them, aligning with the Moral Majority to rail against the network “oligarchy” as a threat to the United States for propagating sleazy sex and violence. Television executives were, in his estimation, a “greedy bunch of jerks” worse than the Nazis and should be tried for treason!
Nonetheless, he agreed to take a meeting with enemy number one: that “cheap whorehouse,” CBS. The disrespect was mutual. CBS President Bill Leonard seemed to have forgotten that he’d dismissed CNN before it launched. Now, as he examined the cost of starting his own round-the-clock news service, Leonard had concluded it would simply be cheaper to just buy it.
For this top secret meeting, the executive flew to Atlanta on the CBS jet and, for maximum privacy, met Ted in a nearby motel. Captain Outrageous sauntered in, chewing his trademark tobacco, casually clad in jeans and Topsiders, sans socks. He cut to the chase.
“I’ll sell you CNN. How much of it do you want to buy?”
The answer: 51 percent or more.
“You want control?” Ted responded, aghast. “You don’t buy control of Ted Turner’s companies. Forty-nine percent or less.”
Leonard told him that simply wasn’t possible. Ted taunted, “Someday, I’m going to own you, you bet I am. Remember I told you so.” Ever the closer, he pushed to make some sort of deal. “I can’t come away from here without selling you something. How about my wife? Lovely lady.”
Just as acute as the financial pinch was the toll on human resources. Staff revolved in and out of CNN and its bureaus as quickly as the front doors spun at Macy’s. Younger employees discovered that with just six months under their belts, they could land better-paying jobs with more humane hours at television stations closer to their hometowns. Veterans like Washington bureau chief George Watson—a big get when he was hired from ABC—couldn’t hack the Chicken Noodle News approach. He’d practically sprinted out of the bureau only months after CNN debuted, driven away by the used furniture ordered for the office and the hasty coverage of the political conventions, duct-taped together at the last minute up in the bleachers and micromanaged from a distance (as most things were) by Reese.3
Inevitably, turf wars emerged, especially among a menacing prounion faction that appeared to be gaining traction. Jim Kitchell, at odds with Reese from nearly the beginning, moved over to work at WTBS.
Elder statesman Sam Zelman didn’t try to mask his dismay over the quality of the product. He described it in one word: skimpy. More time to deliver the news hadn’t, in his estimation, translated into more thoughtful, substantive coverage.
“I’m concerned about the journalism we practice,” he told a reporter. “It’s not how long you make it, as the cigarette people say. It’s how you make it long.”
Others inside CNN put it more succinctly. They dismissed what they were producing as “junk-food news.”
* * *
On that rainy spring Monday in March, Cissy Baker wound up sending her White House crew to a snoozer of a time-filler: the ba
llroom of the sprawling Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, where President Reagan was about to address the national Conference of the Building and Construction Trades of the mighty trade labor union, AFL-CIO.
As was the custom in the carefully orchestrated universe of Washington politics, the text of the speech had been released to the press corps in advance. Most television viewers were unaccustomed to seeing routine events of the day in their entirety, but this was the kind of typical governmental affair that helped CNN burn through many an hour. There was always the chance that at some point the affable president might “commit news,” as the broadcasters cheekily referred to any unexpected development. Maybe there’d be boos from the audience; a bit of mileage could be had from that. As far as Atlanta was concerned, a speech by the president was far preferable to a five-minute, thumbsucking analysis from Daniel Schorr. No wonder his nickname at CBS had been “Jukebox.”
The camera lingered on the president as he shook hands and beamed his movie-star grin. Anchor Bernie Shaw smoothly deployed his inside-the-beltway knowledge in summarizing the remarks. Being able to offer this sort of live, post-game analysis was precisely what had lured him to this job. Who cared if there was no audience?
“President Reagan, in a speech that lasted about nineteen minutes, drew applause four times from this group,” Shaw observed, with such authority that a viewer might actually believe there was a significance to the number of rounds of applause.
His midday assignment complete, he tossed the baton back to Atlanta. And during the next commercial break, Cissy Baker’s wish for a more interesting day suddenly materialized.
The words rang out from the police scanner at 2:27 p.m.
“Shots fired” followed by “Hilton Hotel.”
In that instant, Baker frantically connected the dots: The Hilton? That’s where the president was, with one of her crews wrapping up inside. Her mind raced strategically over the map of the city. The chess game of routing personnel, particularly at a time of crisis, was a crucial part of running an assignment desk. Her back-of-the-hand knowledge of the nation’s capital was precisely the reason she’d been offered this job. It didn’t hurt that she ranked as a Washington insider. Her father happened to be the Senate Majority Leader, Howard Baker.
The next words that bleated out of the scanner offered a disturbing new clue: “Rainbow to GW.” Baker knew the code. “GW” meant the George Washington Hospital, and “Rainbow,” the First Lady. If Nancy Reagan was heading for the hospital, that must be because the president was headed there, too. But why?
Hearing the fracas among his anxious colleagues, Shaw demanded to know what was going on.
A desk assistant said sarcastically, “I think they’re shooting at your president.”
“Don’t joke,” Shaw scolded. For a veteran newsman, he was curiously unjaded—patriotic, and respectful of authority, even. (That didn’t equal passive. As a young member of the Marine Corps in Hawaii, he’d tracked down Walter Cronkite when he’d learned the anchorman was coming to town, urgently hoping for guidance on how to get into the business.)
The assistant responded to Shaw: “I’m not joking.”
A split second later, Atlanta dumped out of a taped report on education in China to anchor Bob Cain on the set.
“We interrupt . . . there’s been a late development,” he said urgently. “Shots reported fired outside the hotel where President Reagan spoke a short while ago. Here’s Bernard Shaw in our Washington bureau.”4
Shaw knew little more than what Cain had just said, but he began to speak, masking the shivers and chills he felt. The mere suggestion of an assassination attempt could plunge the world’s security and economy into a tailspin. His job—his responsibility—was to inform the public in a measured, sober, deliberate tone. It was crucial not to fuel hysteria.
“Bob, as you can understand, details are very sketchy. We don’t know precisely what happened, nor . . . Pardon me.”
His voice was hollow. In his rush to get into position behind the anchor desk, Shaw forgot to clip on his microphone. He calmly reached over to grab it and fastened it in place.
“Okay, my apology,” he said, looking down to consult the fragments of information being rushed before him by Sandy Kenyon, his producer. The young man had been so eager to work at the network that he’d bought a one-way ticket to D.C. from New York and talked his way into a job. At this grave moment, he sat at Shaw’s feet, out of the camera’s view, pecking away on a state-of-the-art IBM Selectric typewriter and synthesizing details as his colleagues collected them.
“Details are very sketchy at this moment,” Shaw repeated. “We don’t know precisely what happened. We don’t know the sequence . . . First of all, the president is safe. We are told that shots were fired at his party as he left the hotel . . . We can report that shots were fired as President Reagan left the Washington Hilton hotel following that address we carried live here on CNN. The president did not appear to be hurt, according to United Press International.” He continued to read the wire copy Kenyon had handed him.
For this vague report, the upstart CNN could now claim a triumph: It had beaten the other networks in announcing the shooting by four whole minutes. To its tiny audience, this didn’t matter. To their broadcast competitors, it was proof CNN meant business.
The only pandemonium greater than the scene of a shooting is the unfolding madness of a newsroom trying to sort out the aftermath. Before now, the mechanics of both were, except for Hollywood depictions and the assassination of President Kennedy, shrouded from public view.
A few minutes later, over on ABC, Shaw’s former colleague, newsman Frank Reynolds, took a deep breath as he summarized the same bits of information Shaw had just delivered. He, however, had a visual aid: videotape shot by the White House press pool.
CNN had been angling to join the pool but had been denied admission for several reasons—because it employed non-union labor; because how could anyone trust this upstart, from second-string cable; because it had never been done any other way before.
“This is the first time any of us has seen this tape,” Reynolds told viewers as the dramatic video, just rushed into the studio, began to roll.5 The eight minutes of footage, he cautioned, were not edited and thus not as neat as it could be. That it was raw made it all the more compelling. Television had changed radically since just six years earlier, when two women in the span of weeks attempted to shoot then president Gerald Ford. TV crews then, not yet equipped to use videotape in the field, captured those incidents on film. Then, the networks had interrupted programming to inform viewers what had occurred, but, with little else to report, waited till their regular nightly newscasts to add to the story.
Now, with the emerging influence of CNN, broadcasters could not afford to fact-check and wait. Reynolds narrated the footage as he watched it for the first time himself.
This is not live, Reynolds remembered to mention as he improvised, but it is fresh tape of the shooting, which had occurred just fifteen minutes earlier. It appeared, he observed, that press secretary Jim Brady had been struck in the head. This prompted a phone call by the anchor, on-set, to a reporter. Where is the president? The president had not yet returned to the White House. He was on the way to the hospital. Wait, the president is on the way to the hospital? Is he on his way, or is he being taken there?
After playing the tape on the air again, Reynolds signed off for the moment. There were so many unanswered questions.
“There really is nothing more that we can tell you at this point,” the ABC newsman told his audience, recapping what he knew so far. “So, that’s it. As soon as we get any more information on this we will come back on the air as quickly as we can.”
Back to the soap opera Edge of Night.
At the first all-news channel, Bernard Shaw didn’t have the luxury to break away and wait for the facts to click into place. This was exactly the kind of developing story made for CNN, the kind Reese had been waiting for—a golden opport
unity to “capture the surfers.”
Besides, CNN had nothing to break away to.
A producer tried to fight the edict to stay on the story.
“We don’t have any information,” he argued. “We don’t know anything!”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” came the order. “Get Bernie back in the chair, and get ready to go.”
Nearly twenty years earlier, during the stone ages of television news, Reese had had to watch as the networks grabbed the glory during the Kennedy assassination—with nary a frame of film of the actual shooting.
Here, now, was his chance to play alongside the networks, in their league—thanks to the invention of videotape, thanks to portable cameras and satellites, thanks to this crazed lunatic of a gunman whose name no one knew yet. Thanks, most of all, to Ted Turner.
But Reese would only be sure he’d arrived completely when he gained admission to that press pool.
To him, the clubby collusion of the networks—how the existence of their troika silenced other competition—boiled his blood and embodied all that was wrong with television.
By bizarre coincidence, this was the day he planned to fire his greatest salvo in this fight to force his way into the inner sanctum. CNN had prepared a lawsuit against the White House and the networks, charging them with antitrust and violation of the First Amendment for blocking CNN from the pool. Now, because of these bullets, the suit would have to wait.6 But to prove his point, he rolled tape on that pooled video and ran a copy of it on his airwaves, anyway. “A pool for one was a pool for all.” Let the networks sue him if they weren’t happy.
Now it was Shaw’s turn to narrate that jarring video for CNN’s tiny audience, his voice competing with a cacophony of sounds—the clanking electric typewriter, bleating television monitors, agitated voices of his behind-the-scenes colleagues, working the phones, hawking the wires, in search of the latest. Details, meanwhile, dribbled in, some tiny, some large, some ultimately incorrect, all absolutely raw. That’s all we have. That’s all we know. We still don’t have that for you. Is that correct? I’m not sure what we’re getting right. Things are in a state of confusion. Chaos around the hotel. The president is okay. Press Secretary James Brady is on the ground and may not be. A Secret Service agent and a cop have been shot, too.
