"Chicken Noodle News"?

ME AND TED AGAINST THE WORLD:
THE UNAUTHORIZED STORY OF THE FOUNDING OF CNN
By Reese Schonfeld
HaperCollins 407 pp. $26

BY NEIL HICKEY

"We will stay on the air till the end of the world and then we will cover the story and sign off playing 'Nearer My God to Thee.'" That's the mission statement Ted Turner offered to anybody who'd listen when CNN was being launched almost twenty-one years ago. So far, the all-news cable network is on track to keep its founder's promise. It reaches more than a billion people worldwide in twelve languages and employs 150 full-fledged correspondents in forty-two cities -- more than ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox combined. For most of those two decades, CNN has been a major destination for viewers when big stories happen: the gulf war, the death of Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crash, the disputed 2000 presidential election.

CNN had a monopoly on national cable news before MSNBC (a joint effort of NBC and Microsoft) came along in July 1996, followed that same year by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel. Those networks' growing influence and popularity, along with CNN's own sclerosis and declining audience, led to the events of mid-January when an internal CNN memo announced a "long overdue . . . radical transformation" in which 400 staffers were fired -- some of them being led ignominiously back to their desks by security officers and told to pack up and be off the premises within the hour.

The arc of CNN's tumultuous story is described with zest, lamentation, humor, bile, and more than a soupcon of score-settling and self-justification by Reese Schonfeld in Me and Ted Against the World: the Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN. The book went to press before the firings, and before AOL and Time Warner (which has owned CNN since 1996) won regulators' approval for a merger that makes CNN a mere cog in the world's largest media machine, and which renders Ted Turner -- who expended sweat, blood, and a major fortune bringing his brainchild to maturity -- a forlorn empty-nester.

Turner asked Schonfeld in 1978 if an all-news cable channel was feasible, and if he'd create it. Schonfeld answered yes and yes. He'd been knocking around the newsreel and TV news business since the 1950s and was ready for the main chance. On paper (but only on paper), he and Turner were well-matched. Both had enormous energy and a buccaneer spirit. Turner had been tossed out of Brown University for having a girl in his room; Schonfeld got kicked out of Harvard Law for gambling. Turner was a champion sailboat racer, winner of the America's Cup; Schonfeld, while an undergraduate at Dartmouth, was a national collegiate bridge champion. Turner cared nothing about television news, and decided on a news channel only because other cable entrepreneurs had coopted movies, sports, and sitcom reruns. Schonfeld was a devout theorist and practitioner of the newsgathering crafts.

Turner informed Schonfeld that CNN "is going to make us the two most powerful men in the world." There was one hitch. Turner had no money. No spending money, anyway. His assets were a tangle of indebtedness. While he begged and borrowed, Schonfeld went ahead and set up headquarters in a derelict Atlanta building that once was a Russian-Jewish country club. He imported a hundred workers under twenty-five years of age to labor in grunt jobs for low, earn-while-you-learn, non-union wages, which turned the CNN offices into a hotbed of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Casting about for staffers with some experience, he landed Daniel Schorr, Bernard Shaw, Mary Alice Williams, Bill Zimmerman, Kathleen Sullivan, Lou Dobbs, Mike Boettcher, Myron Kandel, Dan Dorfman, Jim Miklaszewski, Robin Leach, and a twenty-three-year-old Katie Couric.

By launch day, June 1, 1980, Turner had expended $34.5 million in start-up costs, and was panicked about CNN's prospects. Writes Schonfeld: "He was going into a business he never liked, and about which he knew little. He had every right to be scared. Hell, I was scared, and I knew what I was doing." Back then, less than 20 percent of U.S. homes had cable, and CNN was in only 1.7 million of those -- less than the 3.5 million Turner had promised advertisers. Nineteen-eighty was a presidential election year, and CNN charged into the gladiatorial arena against the three established broadcast networks. At the party conventions in Detroit and New York, anchorman Shaw occupied a tiny open booth near the rafters, and was careful not to lean back in his chair lest he fall a hundred feet into the audience. Politicians declined to be interviewed because they'd never heard of CNN. One CNN staffer called the convention coverage "a four-car pile-up."

But Turner, despite his panic, was undeterred. At a luncheon interview with editors of The New York Times, his opening shot was: "Don't you know we are going to bury you?" The Times was putting out a paper for tomorrow, he told them. "We're putting our news out for today." The Times editors scrutinized him as if he were a side dish of macaroni they hadn't ordered. The revelation -- for them and everyone else -- lay a few years ahead that 24-hour cable news would change everything. Broadcast journalists contemptuously called CNN "Chicken Noodle News," and excluded it from pool coverage until Turner sued and won a partial victory.

There was plenty of breaking news in those first, frantic years: President Reagan, the pope, and John Lennon were shot; Iran released the hostages; Solidarity was a big story in Europe; Argentina grabbed the Falkland Islands; the Columbia space shuttle went aloft; boatloads of Cubans landed in Key West; the U.S. sent troops to El Salvador. CNN was way out front on the AIDS story. Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden debuted a new kind of televised donneybrook called Crossfire.

Schonfeld was tireless in whipping his sometimes mutinous troops into a coherent news organization. He once bawled out Katie Couric, then a field producer, for missing a vital element of an important story. "You got foreplay, you got post-coitus, you missed the climax," he hollered. Couric responded: "You mean all I got was a quick feel, wet sheets, and a cigarette?" He knew then, says Schonfeld, that she was "destined for greatness."

Schonfeld is exaggerating only slightly when he claims that within two years of its launch CNN became a major force in journalism. Cable audiences began to realize that, night or day, this new, revolutionary service was there for a quick fill-in on news of the nation and the world. It had no competition. The World Wide Web was a dozen years in the future; MSNBC and Fox News Channel were not yet on the drawing boards. The broadcast networks' evening news ratings already were in decline. The future was bright.

At that moment, Ted Turner fired Schonfeld. "Right in the middle of a winning streak." He was driving the staff too hard, Turner claimed; the on-screen talent hated him; he wasn't delegating authority. An unnamed talent agent had been "whispering into Ted's ear" that Schonfeld wasn't fair to his clients. Turner reversed some of Schonfeld's personnel decisions, making it impossible for him to remain as president and c.e.o. of the network. At root, the problem was the clash of two considerable egos.

Turner had always kept a sign on his desk that read: "Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way." Writes Schonfeld: "Ted wasn't going to let me lead, I wasn't going to follow him, so I got out of the way."

CNN's ratings took a 20 percent tumble in the succeeding seven months. The ever-unpredictable, often erratic Turner asked Schonfeld to return, but he did not. Schonfeld is at pains to point out that in the eighteen years since his departure, CNN's audience has declined 70 percent.

Reviewing CNN's performance during that period, Schonfeld has harsh words for its current leader, Tom Johnson, who presided over CNN's blackest hour -- the 1998 Operation Tailwind documentary, which claimed that U.S. forces used poison gas in Laos during the Vietnam war. The network subsequently disowned the program and apologized for running it. A news executive should not green-light a documentary and then fail to back up his producers, Schonfeld says. (Nonetheless, had he been running CNN, the Tailwind piece never would have gone on the air. "History should be left to historians.") With Johnson, he writes, Turner had achieved his dream: "He had gotten a president of CNN who knew less about news than he did."

For all its tendentiousness, Me and Ted is a necessary, irresistible read for anybody interested in cable news from its Big Bang in 1980 to the present. It belongs on the shelf with It Ain't As Easy As It Looks by Porter Bibb; CNN: The Inside Story by Hank Whittemore; Ted Turner, The Man Behind the Mouth by Roger Vaughan; Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way by Christian Williams; and Citizen Turner: the Wild Rise of an American Tycoon by Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg. Soon to join those: a CNN history by Peter Arnett and Ed Turner (the latter a former CNN executive unrelated to Ted, and also a target of Schonfeld's barbs).

The author brooks no uncertainty as regards his legacy. "I am the creator of CNN as it appears on the air," he is still reminding us, as late as page 382. "I designed CNN's content, format, and schedule. I recognized the promise of live news. I hired the executives who ran CNN for a generation. I hired the anchors and reporters. I originated the 'CNN look.' I selected the technical equipment . . . . I developed and purchased our computerized newsroom. I selected and leased the sites of the CNN bureaus . . . . I devised a so far union-proof employment system . . . . I knew where news was going . . . . I was a news professional."

Some fact-checking and pencil editing would have improved Me and Ted. The prose roams from past tense to present, sometimes in the same sentence. ("I did not regard SNC as a serious contender, but the banks do," he writes of a news channel that failed.) And: it's Bryant Gumbel, Paul Begala, Geraldine Laybourne, Stan Opotowsky, not Gumble, Begalla, Leybourne, Optowsky. Geostationary satellites hang 25,000 miles over the equator, not 250,000.

A more politic author might have chosen another publisher than Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins lest the suspicious see the book as a torpedo aimed at Fox News Channel's main competitor. CNN, he writes, is "sluggish and constipated," "worldwide and skin-deep," its "promise" never fulfilled. Ted Turner is "a sad, almost tragic figure."

Thoughtfully, Schonfeld has created a Web site (www.MeandTed.com) for readers whose hunger for news of CNN and himself is unappeased by the book, and to answer questions (he provides a few) that were unresolved when it went to press: "Will the AOL/Time Warner merger go through?" (It did.) "Will Ted buy NBC?" (Not so far.) "Will Tom Johnson keep his job?" (No word on that.) "Will Reese Schonfeld ever get back in the news business?" (After this book, that's a tough one.)

For all of CNN's current structural, programming, and audience woes (its 2000 election night coverage was "a debacle," according to a CNN-sponsored independent study), the network is still the benchmark in cable news. Turner and Schonfeld created something new under the sun, back there in 1980, and journalism hasn't been the same since. In the hours before CNN's launch, Schonfeld mused that "from this day forth, presidents and kings, prime ministers and foreign ministers, the Pentagon, Congress, the media, the public, would have to adjust to CNN." He was correct. While other cablenets have competed successfully for the domestic audience, CNN remains a global presence unmatched in television news.

  Neil Hickey isCJR's editor at large.