Description
Can it be done? That's what Ted Turner wanted to know. Just about everybody said no, no way, he's mad even to try. But a few, mavericks all with appetites for risk to match Turner's own, said yes.
And that's how Ted Turner set in motion the greatest adventure of his already adventurous life. Captain Outrageous, just becoming a superstar, started Cable News Network. He put his fortune, then about $100,000,000, on the table and rolled the dice.
On June 1, 1980-only a decade ago-CNN was officially launched, providing all news, all the time, "until the end of the world." Turner loved the risk; he gloried in the chance to heave ABC, NBC, and CBS on their "cozy, overbudgeted, overrated backsides." Roaring his defiance and chomping his cigar, Terrible Ted proclaimed: "I'm going to do news like the world has never seen before."
How right he was! CNN: The Inside Story tells it all. Every good story, every revealing detail, every touch of Turner is here: from his battles with the Big Three networks to his suing those who blocked his success; from bluffing bankers to bullying lawyers; from his near-bankruptcy to CNN's nearly 50,000,000 home television viewers. Author Hank Whittemore paints a fresh portrait of the fellow who was once known as The Mouth of the South, and of that gang of fascinating neophytes and oldtimers who joined him in breaking the rules, chasing the stories, and beating the competition fairly or otherwise.
Whittemore has marvelous accounts of dozens of characters: from a fellow who put a photo of Walter Cronkite in front of his face as he read the news to another who went to work with a gun strapped to his leg. He has telling portraits of Mary Alice Williams (and her accidental live "strip") and Bernie Shaw and Kathleen Sullivan and Dan Schorr and Reese Schonfeld, the pioneering first president of CNN.
This, too, is the story of CNN doing what it now does best: carrying news events live. There was the Iranian hostage release story, the Reagan assassination attempt, the Challenger disaster, the shooting of Pope John Paul II; and then ,of course, there were events like those in China, where CNN, reporting live from Tiananmen Square, became part of the story. Be there and be live, that was always the CNN idea.
Seeping through the pores of the story, at every turn, is Ted Turner himself - laughing, taunting, exuberant, restless, always audacious, always loving the challenge, always with an ego as big as all outdoors. It was Turner who decided to sue to get equal access for CNN to cover the President. It was Turner who tried to take over CBS and admits that if he had succeeded it could have been a financial disaster for him. It was Turner who did buy out MGM, a venture that almost broke him. It is Turner, always Turner, throughout this book, who is looking for the new challenge, the next gamble, the other side of the mountain.
ISBN:9780316937610
