TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82press

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                ⁿ                                                              August 9, 1982 

VIDEO

Shaking Up the Networks


Outrageous as ever, Ted Turner is changing the face of TV news


He is a Southerner's Southerner, a good ole boy on a howl whose
favorite movie is Gone With the Wind. Yet he lived in
Cincinnati until he was nine, headed at 17 to Brown University
in the Ivy League to study ancient Greek culture, and has since
sailed and socialized with the privileged around the world.

He is a celebrated woman chaser who bragged to a Playboy
interviewer that he photographs nude women. Yet he laments the
decline of family values and deplores displays of anatomy and
hints of extramarital sex in movies or on TV.

He is sometimes cunning and guarded, then unnervingly
straightforward. He can be vulgar and abusive to his closest
associates, yet passionately loyal. He cherishes honor and
courage, but is a far better loser than winner, gallant in
defeat, gloating in victory. He is perhaps the most openly
ambitious man in America, yet he admits, "My desire to excel
borders on the unhealthy."  He urges world peace, yet many of
his heroes are conquerors.

A brawler in military school, thrown out of college twice for
carousing, he was even dropped from his fraternity for burning
down its homecoming display. His father called him heir to a
family business, then made an agreement to sell it instead, days
before committing suicide. Nonetheless, from boyhood Robert
Edward Turner III has likened himself to heroes he studied in
the classics, prominent among them Alexander the Great.

Ted Turner, 43, is a prototypical modern celebrity, famous
above all for being famous. He is not so much renowned for his
achievements as his achievements are renowned for being his. He
became "an American folk hero," a characterization he embraces,
as a once successful, twice beaten and now retired yachtsman in
the America's Cup, scarcely a sporting event to figure in
barroom betting. He has also been a regional billboard magnate,
the owner of a newly thriving but previously cellar-dwelling
baseball team and a somewhat more reliable basketball team, and
the licensee of a non-network-affiliated UHF television station
in Atlanta, TV's 17th largest market.

Turner has vaulted past those pursuits to what he calls, with
Characteristic bombast, "the most significant achievement in the
annals of journalism."  Although considerably less than that,
his Cable News Network (CNN) is nevertheless a catalyst for a
burgeoning revolution in television. Turner has shown that
there is a substantial and eager audience for news all the time,
not just in the confined hours at the beginning and end of the
workday. In two years his 24-hour-a-day service has grown to
be sent into 13.9 million households via cable TV. According to
the A.C. Nielsen TV ratings company, CNN attracts viewers in
more than 5.8 million of those homes in an average week.
Editorially, it scoops the Big Three networks on a fair share
of stories. By any measure, CNN is in the big leagues of news.

What makes this enterprise even more remarkable is that it
arose under the once impassive gaze of the three major
networks. For three decades they ruled television news without
serious threat and smugly claimed that no one else could put
together the resources to compete. Ted Turner has challenged
them at their own game, and made them  flinch. Suddenly ABC,
CBS and NBC are providing or planning hours each day of added
news in the late night and early morning, time periods they
long disdained. "The networks," Turner says, "are in stark
terror of us."

Years before he conceived CNN, Turner became a major force in
cable TV through a move of similar ingenuity and daring. It
began in 1970, when to the horror of his financial advisers he
traded $2.5 million worth of stock in his company for title to
Atlanta's Channel 17, a sorry UHF television station that was
losing $600,000 a year. Many viewers around the country did not
pick up UHF signals then; indeed, two years after Turner made
his buy, Atlanta's other UHF station went bankrupt.

Turner fared only slightly better using standard UHF
programming:  cheaply acquired reruns, repackaged old movies,
sports. Then he had a moment of inspiration:  Why not expand
his station's audience manyfold, and thus make it far more
appealing to advertisers, by beaming its signal via satellite to
cable-TV systems around the country, in effect creating another
network?  The start-up would be costly and risky; cable
operators might take the programming, but they would probably
not pay for it, and advertisers were at best dubious that Turner
could actually deliver a measurable increase in viewership.
Moreover, the legalities of the proposal were murky.

The idea worked. When Turner's Channel 17 went onto the
satellite in  December 1976, the concept of the "Superstation"
was born. Imitators followed (notable among them:  Chicago's
WGN-TV and New York City's WOR-TV). Turner is thus commonly
cited as the first cable programmer to distribute via satellite.
He corrects the record: "The first to  go up there was Home Box
Office. I just read about it. Give me the  credit for going
up to New York the next week to talk to the people who had
satellites."  Today Turner's WTBS-TV, airing primarily reruns
and sports, is piped into 20.4 million of the 31 million homes
with cable, far more than any other cable service; in those
homes it commands about a tenth of the audience through the day.
Most important to Turner, WTBS reaped $18 million last year in
profits, and this year, he projects, it will garner $40 million.
That is a significant fraction of the earnings of any of the
Big Three networks, and probably sufficient for now to sustain
CNN.

During the formative years of the Superstation, Turner voiced
both mistrust of journalists and utter lack of interest in
providing TV news. He blamed network coverage for sapping
national morale by harping on the "bad news" of deaths and
deficits rather than the good works of, for example, the Boy
Scouts. He accused "the media" of undermining the credibility
of the U.S. Army through "anti-American" coverage in Viet Nam.
His own station, lacking the resources to compete for serious
news viewers, aired its newscast at 3 a.m. The show took itself
so lightly that Anchor Bill Tush once read an entire script with
his face hidden behind a photograph of Walter Cronkite.

Since creating Cable News Network in 1980, however, the ever
unpredictable Turner has taken to championing the value of
television news. "I'm here to serve as the communicator who gets
people together," he proclaims. "I want to start dealing with
issues like disarmament, pollution, soil erosion, population
control, alternative energy sources."  Turner happily pays the
bills for CNN's seven domestic bureaus and five foreign bureaus
(Rome, London, Tel Aviv, Cairo and Tokyo). Total cost of running
CNN; a substantial $51 million a year. But then, TV news is
always an expensive business. ABC, NBC and CBS decline to
reveal their news budgets, but industry sources say each spends
about $150 million a year. A single installment of the weekday
evening news costs at minimum about $200,000 and can range far
higher; one report from Lebanon consumes about $4,000, not
counting travel, editing and courier costs.

So far, Turner has concentrated on the business side of CNN,
leaving news decisions largely to professional journalists. But
some reporters' hackles were raise din mid-May when, after a
power struggle, Turner accepted the resignation of CNN's first
president, Reese Schonfeld, who has spent an estimable career
developing alternatives to network news. One cause of the
dispute was Schonfeld's decision to fire Interviewer Sandi
Freeman, CNN's most popular performer, who, Schonfeld said, was
not a journalist. As soon as Schonfeld resigned. Turner
started negotiating to get Freeman back. Turner kept Schonfeld
on as a consultant corporate board member, however, and as
replacements he named a committee of key Schonfeld aides:  Ed
Turner (no relation), Burt Reinhardt and Robert Wussler, a
tough-minded former president of CBS-TV. Wussler contends that
Ted Turner will continue to stand apart from CNN's day-to-day
journalistic operations. Explains Wussler:  "He does not have
time for it, and he knows that is where he would be most
vulnerable to his detractors."

Turner appeared to contradict that hands-off policy in late May
when he recorded his first CNN editorial, opposing violence in
movies, and had it shown eleven times (plus ten airings on the
Superstation). He attacked The Deer Hunter, a Viet Nam War
drama, The Warriors, a fictional portrayal of New York City
youth gangs, and especially Taxi Driver, the film that allegedly
inspired John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President
Reagan. Said Turner:  "The people responsible for this movie
should be just as much on trial as John Hinckley himself...Write
your Congressman and your Senator right away, and tell him that
you want something done."  Despite the fervor of that Citizen
Kane outburst, which renewed speculation that Turner aspires to
political office, Turner did not prevent CNN Commentator Daniel
Schorr from contradicting him in an on-air reply. Schorr echoed
Turner's concerns but opposed congressional action that might
conflict with First Amendment guarantees against censorship.
There has been no similar on-air performance by Turner since.

The heart of CNN's day is from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., E.T.:  half an
hour of business and economic news, followed by half an hour of
sports, and then two hours of world and national reports. "A
newspaper you can watch" is the way Turner describes it. The
format for the rest of the day is much like an extended version
of NBC's Today or ABC's Good Morning America:  sober and almost
impersonal in the hourly news summaries, folksy in such soft
segments as Arden Zinn's exercise class and Dr. Steve Kritsick's
advice on pet care, downright gossipy in the late-night hour of
Hollywood chitchat by longtime Syndicated Talk Host Mike
Douglas.

CNN is news without stars, new without end, and virtually news
without editing. With the notable exception of a few Big Three
network emigres, including Washington Reporters Schorr and
Bernard Shaw, most of CNN's regular on-air personnel are
unfamiliar and even unimposing. They tend to be former local
station anchors and reporters. Odd for a service founded by a
master of self-publicity, CNN is almost entirely devoid of
show-business pizazz. That sometimes makes it dull. But at the
same time it diminishes the worrisome phenomenon of the
reporter's on-air personality overshadowing the news. Says
Schorr:  "We spend our time getting out of the way of the news.
We have demystified what an anchor does because we have so
many."

CNN is there for the viewer whenever it is convenient for him.
The late Communications Theorist Marshall McLuhan envisaged
television as creating a sort of global village into which
everyone could plug merely by turning on his set. Indeed, much
of the psychic appeal of television, as opposed to film or
print, is its immediacy:  you can be there at the moment
something happens. But until CNN, every TV news show had a
closed narrative structure of beginning, middle and end. The
world was tied up into neat packages and presented at fixed
hours, after the fact, except for coverage of the most
extraordinary events. Turner's news, by contrast, stretches on,
sometimes haphazardly, like life.

The absence of pressure to make choices, to pare down and
winnow out, means that CNN can explore the day's issues at
enough length to avoid the pitfalls of oversimplicity and
superficiality. But it can also waste viewers' time. Moreover,
the heavily scheduled rookie reporters sometimes bring scant
backgrounds to the stories they cover. Says one senior insider:
"They do not always understand that length is not depth."  That
problem has been compounded by a lack of decisive leadership
since Schonfeld left. And it could worsen: several of the
overworked and underpaid producers are being romanced by the Big
Three networks. There are other significant failings. Visual
quality is often shabby, with footage lopsided or out of focus,
and some employees suggest that equipment is in short supply and
inadequately maintained. Commentators sometimes read from notes
so that they display less of their faces than the tops of their
heads. Even CNN's all-inclusive approach to Government events
draws some in-house criticism. The former policy of
gavel-to-gavel coverage of often tedious congressional hearings,
says one insider,  was "lazy journalism". Although CNN airs
some specials, it has no documentary unit comparable to the 60
Minutes team at CBS or the Close-Up producers at ABC.

Yet CNN has plainly made its established competitors wary. Until
recently the offices of news executives at the Big Three
networks each contained three monitors, tuned to ABC, NBC and
CBS. Now in many there is a fourth, tuned to CNN. On a few
occasions, CNN's lean operation has outpointed the far more
heavily staffed networks. CNN was the first to report that
President Reagan had in fact been hit during John Hinckley's
assassination attempt in March 1981, in part because it stayed
on the air while ABC and CBS resumed regular programming after
telling viewers, as was first believed, that the President was
unhurt. In El Salvador, where CNN was outstaffed four or five
to one by each of the Big Three networks, it was CNN
Correspondent James Allen Miklaszewski who caused worldwide
furor by photographing an American military "adviser" carrying
an M-16 rifle in violation of U.S. Government policy. Satisfying
as those coups were, perhaps most significant was a victory CNN
won by taking the networks and the White House to court:  it now
has a full share in providing and receiving pool coverage of
day-to-day Administration events.

CNN has won the grudging respect of senior news executives at
all three major networks. Says Van Gordon Sauter, president of
CBS News:  "We see CNN as a very good service...but not of
network quality."  Adds Richard Wald, senior vice president for
news at ABC:  "CNN does a nice, straightforward, basic rendition
of the news very competently."  Outside analysts are more
generous. Anthony Hoffmann, a cable analyst for Warburg Paribas
Becker Securities, observes, "People talking to a CNN reporter
do not seem to think they are talking to the whole world and so
they say things they will not say to the networks. You hear more
of the words of the people and less prepackaged editorializing.
 I think the American public is getting suspicious of
prepackaged news."

Turner has benefited in part from the general advance of cable,
ABC, NBC and CBS combined still draw 80% of total TV viewing.
But CBS Broadcast Group President Gene Jankowski predicted to
TIME Correspondent Janice C. Simpson that by 1990 the three
networks' share in households with cable will drop to 57%.
Turner claims CBS sought to counter that slippage by once trying
to buy CNN; Jankowski sidesteps making any answer to that
suggestion. But industry sources say there may be a continuing
interest at CBS in breaking into cable news.

Eager to solidify his position against a host of potential
competitors, including the networks, Turner revved up his
competitive pace in January with CNN2. The programs use the
same raw material as CNN but reshape it into a 24-hr. hard-news
"headline service," similar to network news shows or all-news
radio. In contrast to CNN, which is structured for extended
viewing, CNN2 is meant to provide a quick catch-up on the news
whenever the audience tunes in. The service is supplied via
satellite to cable systems that are wired into 1.5 million
homes, and to some 78 broadcast TV stations. Sixty-six of them
are affiliates of the Big Three networks. Cable operators who
buy CNN can get the second channel free. Broadcasters use CNN2
as part of their normal over-the-air programming; they pay a
cash fee and share the commercial time with Turner.

When affiliates started buying CNN2, the networks were
galvanized into action. CBS, which had been considering an
overnight news offering for years, decided to hurtle ahead: in
October it will launch weeknight news shows from 2 a.m. to 7
a.m. E.T. Also in October, ABC will follow Nightline with a
midnight-to-1-a.m. show featuring Interviewer Phil Donahue, NBC
last month premiered a featurish hour of news from 1:30 to 2:30
a.m. four nights a week, and from 2 to 3 a.m. on Friday, and a
morning program preceding Today, from 6:30 to 7 a.m., and using
Today's personnel. ABC countered with a 6-to-7-a.m. headline
news show in repeating 15-min. cycles. Says NBC News President
Reuven Frank:  "The late-night and early broadcasts are partly
a result of competitive pressure from Turner, and partly a
reflection of the fact that CNN has established that there is
an audience."

Financially, CNN is a lot less steady. Although Turner
acknowledges he lost an estimated $2 million a month in the
early stages, he contends that CNN was nearly in the black
within 18 months of start-up. But the costs of CNN2 and a big
new promotional campaign, everyone agrees, have pushed the
project back into the red:  losses for CNN averaged $1.1 million
a month despite monthly revenues of $3.4 million during the
first six months of 1982, and CNN2's monthly losses were about
$800,000 more. With the lagging U.S. economy damping down
advertising revenues. Turner has abandoned his projection that
CNN can make a profit this year. Turner's troubles have led
many industry observers to predict that within the next year or
two he will have to sell or take in a partner, or else see CNN
go bankrupt (the total value of his holdings:  $250 million to
$300 million, says a top-rank video executive). Turner's
financing includes $50 million in loans at steep interest from
Citicorp and Manufacturers Hanover Trust. In borrowing from
them, he estimated losses of $32 million from CNN's start
through the first half of this  year; he is $6 million over
that total.

Even more worrisome, after two years of savoring competitive
victories. Turner faces some hard-driving rivals on his own
turf. Units of ABC and Westinghouse Group W, the country's
largest non-network station group, have joined to offer their
own 24-hour cable news headline service, Satellite News
Channels, which started airing June 21. To date, however, SNC
is less varied and ambitious than CNN. It offers three 18-min.
newscasts an hour, plus quick regional news bulletins. SNC,
like CNN2, is intended for brief sampling rather than the
extended viewing sought by CNN; the new service is explicitly
patterned after similarly repetitive all-news radio stations.
SNC's ABC footage is limited to stories that do not feature
network correspondents; the network thus provides only 15% to
20% of the total film and tape. Even so, foreign coverage has
been generally solid. But for its first six weeks, SNC had on
board only ten of the 24 regional TV stations that are supposed
to supply U.S. news. That reporting system will not be complete
until late December.

SNC's real threat to CNN, however, is financial, not editorial.
While Turner charges cable systems at least 15 cents a
subscriber each month for CNN, SNC is offered free. In fact,
cable operators who had signed on by the debut date were granted
a start-up bonus of 50 cents a household. The financial
incentives helped:  SNC has already signed up systems with 3
million subscribers, including 620,000 from Westinghouse Group
W's own cable systems. Only about a dozen cable systems,
though, have dropped CNN to take SNC.

To substitute SNC for CNN may be risky. Admits George
Livergood, who until the end of May was regional vice president
of Group W systems in the Southwest:  "Once you give something
to a subscriber, you never take it away."  When Livergood
operated Theta Cable in West Los Angeles (now Group W Cable), an
engineering snafu deprived 9,000 customers of CNN during
coverage of the first space shuttle flight.  Says Livergood:
"We got 2,000 phone calls an hour. The shuttle was on seven
other channels, but they chose to call rather than switch."

In fact, Turner is banking on the loyalty of cable operators as
well as viewers, although such allegiance is by no means
assured. Says Marc Nathanson, who represents 40 cable systems
in California:  "I'm wondering if our pocketbooks are going to
outweigh our feelings toward the pioneers who took the risks.
As for me, I'm supporting old Ted and sticking by his service."
 Playing on the traditional suspicion between broadcasters and
cable people, Turner has launched  a direct-mail campaign aimed
at arousing cable operators; he enclosed copies of ABC memos
counseling local affiliate stations to use every resource,
including the stations' news and public affairs departments, to
campaign for "free TV."  At the National Cable Television
Association convention in Las Vegas in May, Turner reminded
cable-system owners of the Johnny-come-lately quality of his
opposition with placards, buttons and a giant 3-D billboard of
himself playing the guitar, all inscribed with a slogan
paraphrased from a country music song title:  I WAS CABLE WHEN
CABLE WASN'T COOL.

Cable-system owners seem to warm to the message, and to
Turner's style as a personal entrepreneur in a gray, corporate
age. Most of them talk freely of a hugely lucrative
"communications revolution" in the decade to come, and they
honor Turner as the most important supplier of basic cable
service to advance that future. They thronged to his kickoff
party at the NCTA gathering and were plainly pleased as the
whippet-like (6 ft. 1 in., 175 lb.) Turner windmilled through
the crowd greeting many by name, his raspy drawl audible from
yards away despite the background music.

Turner is said to be congenitally unable to keep a secret. At
Las Vegas he was supposed to announce at a press conference that
he had signed a deal to distribute CNN in Japan. But a day
before, he was blurting out the details to anyone close enough
to listen. As a businessman he shows little suspicion and less
patience. He sometimes makes deals to distribute CNN on the
basis of 30 seconds of chat and a handshake, even with
strangers.

Turner's whirlwind pace leaves most aides looking a little
shell-shocked. He is a kaleidoscope of ever shifting moods,
interests, personalities:  now the apoplectic boss, now the
courtly charmer, now the scholar and Renaissance man, now the
buccaneer business baron. If Turner were a character from
Shakespeare, and he has that kind of incandescence, he would be
in equal parts the nobly ambitious Prince  Hal, the impulsively
belligerent Hotspur and the comically self- indulgent Falstaff.
 Says Schonfeld:  "If Ted Turner were a color, it would be
red--the red of the surface of the sun." Adds another Turner
aids, insisting that he not be named:  "Do I like Ted?  Do you
like a volcano?"  Turner's wife Jane says she is sure he must
have been a hyperactive child:  "He's hyperactive now."

He has a genuine love of risk and an abiding faith in the value
of competition, win or lose. He trusts his own vision and
scorns prudent measures like market research. He loves to cast
himself as a hapless crusader or starry-eyed underdog, and
revels in emerging as the triumphant idiot savant. Some of his
grandiose behavior stems from a boyish love of audacity and
outrage, some from an outsize appetite for experience. He once
told George Breece, his Washington lobbyist. "I want to live
five lives. I have to hurry to get them all in."

But there is a haunted side to Turner. He is as acutely aware
of childhood traumas as of childhood dreams of conquest. His
memories are shot through with a ceaseless struggle to prove
himself worthy, with a sense of rejection as a Yankee in the
south and a Southerner in the North, and with the agonizing
depressions and deaths of his father and his only sibling Mary
Jane. Coupled with an inborn restlessness, those memories have
left him all but incapable of repose.

His father Ed Turner came off a hard-scrabble farm in Sumner,
Miss., and entered the billboard business. In pursuit of
ambition he moved the family from Cincinnati to Savannah when
Ted was nine. Almost immediately Ted was shipped off to Georgia
Military Academy, just outside Atlanta. He arrived six weeks
after the school year started, the last entrant to his class,
with an alien accent; he knew trouble was ahead, and came out
fighting. Thus began a pugilistic attitude that lasted into
adulthood. Turner was all the more motivated to establish his
virility with his fists because he found no glory on the playing
field:  he tried football, basketball and baseball and was
lackluster at each. He finally turned to a sport that required
no special physical talent, just brains, determination and
nerve. Ted Turner soon became known as the Capsize Kid, a
fanatic sailor. He took crazy changes and rarely won, but he
loved the competitive frenzy.

Life was strict, punishment swift and reward restrained at home
as at military school, though father and son were close, Ed
occasionally used a wire coathanger "to get my attention," Ted
recalls. He was assigned onerous chores to earn his pocket
money, and by his late teens his father charged him rent during
summer vacations. For Ted's graduation from his second military
academy, the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ed Turner
offered an enticing but booby-trapped present:  a share of the
cost of a Lightning-class sailboat. The rest was to come from
Ted's savings, and would, his father knew, take virtually every
cent the boy had.

For college Ted wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy at
Annapolis. His father insisted on the Ivy League. Rejected by
Harvard, Ted went off to Brown to study the Greek classics whose
mythical and historic heroes had inspirited him as a teen-ager.
 His father again disapproved and sent a long, literate but
contemptuous letter. It said, "I am appalled, even horrified,
that you have adopted classics as a major. As a matter of fact,
I almost puked on the way home today...I am a practical man, and
for the life of me I cannot possibly understand why you should
wish to speak Greek...I have read, in recent years, the
deliberations of Plato and Aristotle, and was interested to
learn that the old bastards had minds which worked very
similarly to the way our minds work today. I was amazed that
they had so much time for deliberating and thinking, and was
interested in the kind of civilization that would permit such
useless deliberation...I think you are rapidly becoming a
jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere,
the better it will suit  me."

The angry son did the only thing he could to upstage his
father: he published the letter in the Brown University
newspaper. But Ed Turner apparently won his battle. Soon
afterward, Ted switched his major to economics. And he did
indeed leave Brown; after having been suspended twice for
infractions involving women, he headed down to Florida and lived
like a bum, then returned to Georgia to join his father in the
billboard business.

Through much of his teens, a turbulent time for anyone, Ted
shared a special family grief, when he was 15 and she was three
years younger, his sister Mary Jane was stricken with a severe
form of lupus erythematosus, a disease that causes the body to
make antibodies against its own tissues. Even now Turner looks
away when he speaks of her suffering, and his express-train
speech slows to a flat few  words. "She was sweet as a little
button, she worshiped the ground I walked on, and I loved her. A
horrible illness."  To intimates he has described nightmarish
scenes that took place as pain and deterioration tormented her
nervous system. Carpenters were brought in to pad her room.
She screamed, "God, let me die, let me die!"

Her death after five years of suffering increased the pressure
on Ted as the only surviving child. When he went to work for
his father, the lessons in business were intense. Says Turner:
"Driving in to work, he told me about the tax laws,
amortization, depreciation, sales, management, construction. He
told me how he got started, what happened in competitive
situations, how he lost business and how he  got it."  Always Ed
Turner instilled ambition, and the self-doubt that keeps driven
men going. Says his son of that training:  "All my  life I have
had this gnawing pain that I might not succeed. It is only in
the past four or five years that I have put that ghost to rest."

By the time Ted was in his 20s, Ed Turner was long since a
millionaire. He went on buying companies, ran up debts,
prospered yet worried. Eventually he grew despondent:  he
decided his expansion had been a great mistake. He signed an
agreement to sell his billboard firm's big, newly acquired
Atlanta division. Then Ed Turner retreated to his plantation in
South Carolina and on March 5, 1963, at age 53, shot himself.

Turner discussed the psychic impact of that suicide in a speech
at Georgetown University this spring. Said he:  "My father died
when I was 24. That left me alone, because I had counted on him
to make the judgment of whether or not I was a success." His
father's erratic business behavior and sudden death put young
Ted to what old friends still consider his toughest test as a
businessman:  he had to find a way to nullify the sale contract
and win back the Atlanta billboard business.

Ted used all his father's lessons, all his own natural guile.
While the deal was pending, he lured away employees (a key but
unsalable asset) from the Atlanta unit to the Macon, Ga.,
division that he retained. He shifted lucrative contracts
between companies. He threatened to destroy financial records,
"to build billboards in front of theirs."  And when at last he
persuaded the buyers to rescind the deal in exchange for
$200,000, money he did not have, he gambled that they would wait
to be paid to avoid an income tax of 90% on a short-term gain.
 Thus was born the financing rule that has since governed many
a Turner acquisition:  never make a down payment unless it is
with the other fellow's money.

While Turner the businessman recovered quickly from his
father's death, the inner man has been deeply, almost
obsessively affected. Says a friend:  "He talks about death
incessantly. Over the years, killing himself was a high-priority
topic of conversation. Most of the time he was flippant about
it. He would talk in this joking way about how, if things did
not work out, he could always sell the business, how all he
needed was roof over his head and some food.  Then he would
say, `If things get really bad, I can always kill  myself.'  He
could not go several days without talking about suicide."

Things have not, however, gone badly. Turner proved far more
adept than even his father at the billboard business. As the
money rolled in, he looked for new pursuits. One was
world-class sailing. Eventually he competed as far away as
Australia, often for months each year. His long absences were
possible only through the boundless patience of his second wife
Jane, who raised his two children by a first marriage (which
ended in divorce about two decades ago) and three of their own
with a stoic emphasis on her role in providing "stability." She
recalls ruefully such times as the three consecutive Christmases
when the children (the youngest is now 13) were ocean orphans
because Turner was away sailing. "He never had to worry about
our children," she says. "I did that for both of us."

By the time Turner was 30 he had found his next challenge:
broadcasting. He then got into sports when he bought the right
to broadcast Atlanta Braves games; the sportscasts proved
popular, so to keep the money-losing team in town, and on the
air, he acquired the Braves outright. Late he picked up the
Atlanta Hawks basketball team and financed the purchase of a now
defunct soccer team, carrying their games on the station that
he eventually renamed WTBS, for Turner Broadcasting System.
Then came the idea for the supremely lucrative Superstation.

As it grew, Turner succeeded in another high-cost, high-risk
challenge:  the America's cup, yachting's premier prize, which
he lost in 1974 but won in 1977. No money could buy the
publicity he enjoyed during the summer when he won. Turner was
quotable and accessible; he was a hard-cussin' ordinary guy
competing in a tight-lipped rich man's sport. He acted like
Captain Bligh with his crew, and they seemed to love him for it.
 On the day he won, he showed up at a press conference roaring
drunk. When someone moved his bottle of aquavit out of view of
the cameras, Turner dropped under the table to retrieve it. He
was amiably, gloriously outrageous.

But when the Turner family watches a documentary about the
months he spent seeking the Cup in Newport, R.I., Jane makes a
short, undeniable observation:  There is not a glimpse of her or
their children anywhere in the film. Ted Turner considers
himself a devoted husband and father, but the price of his
ambition is paid as much by his family as by himself. He
travels on business some part of every week. He schedules every
day, whether he is at the family's home in Atlanta or at the
5,000-acre plantation in Jacksonboro, S.C., where the Turners
spend about half their time. Still, at the country retreat Jane
Turner asks in all seriousness:  "Doesn't he seem more relaxed
here?"  He will go for months without attending a social event,
even a meal out, that is not related to work.

relatively innocent, if unjustified, familiarity. But it can
lead to ugliness. When he pinched the wife of former Atlanta
Braves Pitcher Dick Ruthven, the player made the incident public
and demanded, successfully, to be traded. Jane Turner keeps her
opinion of such exploits to herself.

A friend sees Turner's behavior as evidence of anxiety:  "Ted
does these bold things in business, puts everything he has on
the line. The pressure can get almost unbearable. The way he
reacts is to get loud and hyper and irritating. The nervousness
comes out in this compulsive attraction to women. If a pretty
girl walks by, I might peek out of the corner of my eye. When
Ted is in one of those pressure-filled moods, he is likely to
jump out and follow the pretty girl down the street."

The pressures on Turner must be considerable. Like his father,
he has expanded his business, taken on debt and risked all on
having judged the market aright. Unlike his father, he refuses
to retrench. Much of his personal property is pledged as
collateral for loans, and nearly all of his worth is tied up in
87% of the Turner Broadcasting System's stock.

Yet he keeps on spending. He plans to build a $31 million
movie and TV production studio in Atlanta next year and start
making his own features. Already he is financing Jacques
Cousteau's exploration of the Amazon in exchange for television
rights, and the Superstation makes original shows, including
Nice People, documentary profiles of community benefactors, and
Winners, American real-life success stories.

Turner knows he faces an uphill battle. He knows too that
there are a lot of corporate buzzards circling overhead, hoping
CNN will falter so they can pick its carcass clean. But Turner
has built a unique career on being an optimist. And on being
right. Says he:  "Sure, I'm worried. But I'm not that worried.
 As soon as I earn me my billion dollars, I am going to buy a
network. I am going to find the new Frank Capra and set him to
making movies. I can quit whenever I want to. I am not worried
about what people think. But I am the right man in the right
place at the right time, not me alone, but all the people who
think the world can be brought together by telecommunications."

That man who has taken on the sports Establishment, the federal
regulatory bureaucracy, the old-money yachting elite, the
networks and, perhaps most daunting, his own exacting demands of
himself, ponders a moment when asked who he really is and
dredges up yet another heroic memory. "Charlemagne," Ted Turner
replies, at least half-seriously, "saving Christendom from the
infidels."


--By William A. Henry III.