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TURNER BROADCASTING SYSTEM

Cable Pioneer

Ted Turner, the unconventional Atlanta-based entrepreneur who was also known as "Captain Outrageous" and the "Mouth of the South," became one of the pioneers of the burgeoning cable-television industry in the 1980s. Beginning in the late 1970s he parlayed an independent Atlanta television station and an idea for a twenty-four-hour news channel into the foundation of the multibillíon-dollar Turner Broadcasting System.

Billboard Start

Turner Advertising was a prosperous billboard business in Savannah, Georgia, that Ted Turner inherited under tragic circumstances when his father committed suicide in 1963. Several months earlier, the senior Turner had made a series of business deals that made Turner Advertising the largest outdoor advertising company in the Southeast and gained the company entry into the lucrative market in Atlanta, the capital of the "New South." The company was in financial upheaval after Ed Turner's death, but his son had remarkable success over the next year. He built a clientele made up mostly of local businesses in the Atlanta area and—demonstrating the lack of subtlety that would characterize his career—built a seven-story billboard along the newly constructed Atlanta Freeway. At that same time Turner was establishing himself as a talented yachtsman, winning the first of several national championships in August 1963.

Station Purchases.

In 1968 Turner began to expand his business into broadcasting as well, purchasing a radio station in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Other stations in Jacksonville, Florida, and Charleston, South Carolina, soon followed. In 1970, most significant for the future of Turner's cable empire, he purchased WJRJ, a failing independent Atlanta television station whose only distinction was that it had the tallest freestanding transmission tower in the country, and soon renamed it WTCG, for Turner Communications Group. Since Turner was completely lacking in television experience, the venture seemed sure to fail; the entrepreneur compounded his apparent madness by acquiring another independent station, WRET in Charlotte, six months later. Soon the financial situation of the two stations was so dire that WRET resorted to a "begathon," asking for viewer donations and promising to repay them with interest when the station turned a profit.

Programming.

WTCG, meanwhile, continued to limp along in Atlanta, offering a steady diet of old situation comedies, wrestling and roller derbies, movies, and Atlanta Braves baseball. About this time Turner had his first experience with cable, when Teleprompter, the largest cable distribution company in the 1970s, wanted to make a deal that would send WTCG's fare of old movies and Braves games to cable subscribers throughout the Southeast. WTCG's association with Teleprompter marked a turning point for the station: by the end of 1973 the station earned its first real profit. A little more than a year later, inspired by the potential of Home Box Office, Turner bought a link to RCA's new telecommunications satellite. The satellite uplink eliminated the need for the costly system of microwave transmitters that had been used to beam WTCG's signal to cable subscribers; once on the satellite the dying station could compete in markets around the nation. As Turner told the House Sub-committee on Communication in 1976, cable alternatives to the Big Three networks would benefit the country as a whole: "They [ABC, CBS, and NBC] have an absolute, a virtual stranglehold, on what Americans see and think, and I think a lot of times they do not operate in the public good, showing overemphasis on murders and violence and so forth." His "SuperStation," he argued, "will be another voice. Perhaps it might be a little more representative of what the average American would like to see."

Satellite Network.

Because of its satellite link WTCG was now available to viewers in twenty-seven states, but advertisers were slow to get onboard. The station was still too small for national companies, and Atlanta-based sponsors were not willing to pay extra so that their commercials would be seen in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Hawaii. Turner would often accompany his sales staff to meet potential clients, but his brash, often vulgar style—which included getting on his hands and knees or climbing on tables and shouting at the top of his voice—hurt more often than it helped.

Baseball

The only WTCG programming that consistently drew advertisers, at least in the Southeast, was its sports coverage, despite the fact that the Braves were a perennial cellar team. By the 1975 season it seemed likely that the Braves would leave Atlanta and deprive the SuperStation of a crucial source of revenue. Turner's solution was typically flamboyant: he bought the team. Still, the move made plenty of business sense: WTCG would no longer have to pay for the rights to show the Braves games and would have hundreds of hours of cheap programming every year. Turner approached owning the Braves with his customary love of showmanship, making singing commercials with the team and on opening night of the 1976 season jumping out onto the field during the game to congratulate Ken Henderson on a home run.

America's Cup

Turner had become a national celebrity, primarily for his antics as the Braves' owner and for his skill as a sailor. In June 1977 he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the first of several national magazines that would feature "Captain Ted" and his gap-toothed grin. That summer Turner led a yachting crew that successfully qualified to represent the United States in the 1977 America's Cup races. When the crew of the Courageous beat Australia to win the cup that fall, Turner was a national hero. Turner returned to Atlanta and the business of running the SuperStation, but he was also distracted by a new idea: a television station devoted exclusively to reporting the news.

All News

Conventional wisdom held that the public taste for news, except in unusual circumstances, was limited to a half-hour summary of the day's events during the customary news hour, 6:00 to 7:00 P.M. Turner was not the first to come up the idea of an all-news channel, but previous efforts had failed to break the monopoly held by the "Big Three." WTCG's journalism was limited to a tongue-in-cheek newscast hosted by an anchorman and a talking German shepherd, so critics were understandably doubtful about Turner's new endeavor. Turner himself was candid about his contempt for most television journalism. "I never watched TV at night. I hated television.…Can I tell you how many hours of TV news I watched, before I started my own network when I was forty? I had not watched more than maybe a hundred hours in my whole life." In the late 1970s Turner busily assembled the personnel of his new Cable News Network. As he had in the past, Turner invested a considerable amount of his personal fortune in the effort to get the new network off the ground. CNN debuted in June 1980, and before long the network had transformed broadcast journalism. (See the section on the Cable News Network in this chapter.)

A Growing Empire

Turner's cable operations, for which he had laid the groundwork in the 1970s, took on the proportions of an empire in the 1980s. In 1981, in order to head off competition in the form of the Satellite News Channel, Turner Communications launched CNN-2, soon to become Headline News, which condensed CNN material into the more familiar half-hour news format. CNN lost millions of dollars in its first years of existence; but the SuperStation (renamed WTBS, for Turner Broadcasting System, in 1979) continued to grow, reaching 80 percent of cable subscribers by 1984—approximately 34 million households, un-imaginable when the station ranked a distant fourth in a four-station town. Not all of Turner's ventures were successful, however: in 1984 he launched a video channel, the Cable Music Channel (CMC), which would offer a more wholesome alternative to MTV. For Turner competition with the established music channel took the form of a moral crusade: "You can take a bunch of young people and turn them into Boy Scouts or into Hitler Youth, depending on what you teach them, and MTV's definitely a bad influence. My wife used the word 'satanic' to describe it." But the crusade was short-lived. CMC was only on the air for five weeks in the fall of 1984 before it sold off its assets to MTV.

Aware of Influence

Despite its failure, CMC was indicative of Turner's approach in the 1980s. He was sensitive to his unique and influential position as the owner of two of cable television's most widely viewed networks. As he was fond of telling interviewers, "I want to be the hero of my country. I want to get it back to the principles that made us good. Television has led us, in the last twenty-five years, down the path of destruction. I intend to turn it around before it is too late." He even briefly considered a run for the presidency of the United States in 1984, despite being more or less apolitical all of his life. Turner felt passionately about environmental issues, and he believed in the necessity of overcoming international conflicts—and he had the resources to bring his message to hundreds of millions of Americans. Increasingly, WTBS and CNN devoted programming time to the issues of deforestation, overpopulation, and global warming, until by the end of the decade nearly three hundred hours of programming time on the two networks was devoted annually to environmental issues.

Setbacks

The late 1980s saw a series of setbacks for Turner Communications. In 1985, hoping to join in the corporate takeovers of the Big Three that began when Capital City Communications bought ABC, Turner tried to buy CBS, which was something like a minnow attempting to swallow a whale. Although a complete failure, the CBS takeover attempt helped further Turner's reputation as a major player in the television industry. That same year, Turner sought entry into the world of Hollywood entertainment with the purchase of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer entertainment company. Turner soon realized he had overextended himself and was forced to sell off most of M-G-M's holdings, much of it back to its former owner at a significant loss. Turner Communications kept only the M-G-M film library of more than three thousand movies, for which it still owed M-G-M __BODY__ billion. Even Turner's plan for making money with the M-G-M movies, by "colorizing" black-and-white movies through computer animation, turned out to be a public-relations nightmare. Turner had been interested in securing for TBS the rights to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, and he sent an emissary to Moscow to encourage the Soviet Union to attend. When the plan fell through, TBS broadcast its own version of the Olympics, the "Goodwill Games," in 1986. The games sparked little interest among the world's athletic community or television viewers, and TBS lost $26 million on the venture.

TNT

By the end of the decade, however, Turner Communications had added another jewel to its crown: Turner Network Television (TNT), which debuted in October 1988 in nearly 20 million homes. TNT made use of the M-G-M film library (the first movie shown on the channel was Turner's favorite, Gone With the Wind) but also lured big-name Hollywood talent and major production studios to make movies for the network. The network also secured the rights to NFL and NBA games, which helped to make it an immediate success. By mid 1989, the four networks of the Turner Broadcasting System—WTBS, CNN, CNN Headline News, and TNT—were in millions of homes in the United States and abroad, watched by approximately one-third of all cable viewers. Less than twenty years after Turner's Charlotte station had to beg viewers to help it stay on the air, Turner Broadcasting held assets of $5 billion.