Lisa NapoliUp All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News

* On June 1, 1980 - (Wow, 40 years ago THIS WEEK) - Ted Turner, the former conservative champion yachtsman, mischievous ladies' man and owner of billboards, radio and TV stations - launched the Cable News Network (CNN) - vowing it would stay on until "the end of the world."* Author Lisa Napoli loves origin stories with outrageous characters, e.g., her last books were about Ray Kroc and McDonald's - and about her quirky time starting a radio station in remote Bhutan. She's great at spotting amusing details - and has a writing style that's factual, entertaining and irreverent - without pushing an agenda.------------* In "Up All Night" - Napoli chooses to not wade into the partisan waters about how CNN went from "the most trusted name in news" - to what she herself acknowledged in interviews this month - is a polarized brand today. She cares more about eccentric geniuses who are irresistible forces of nature - who change history.* In her book, Napoli says Ted Turner is better known today as a billionaire environmentalist. But she writes, he was also a man filled with contradictions. She says Turner used to writhe on floors, begging for money from clients, predicting self-ruin - and that he paradoxically admired Hitler for his "organizational skills" (p. 33) - and thought Jesus didn't get "rolling" until he was crucified, sparing him from being "a long-haired hippie freak" (p. 98). She writes how Turner was a chauvinist who picked women for their looks, not intellect - describing his ex-wife, progressive activist and actress Jane Fonda - as "the best lay" he ever had (p. 2), but that he "loved her still" - even after giving her $100 million in a divorce settlement.------------* Napoli writes that "all night TV news" began with the Kathy Fiscus rescue story in 1949 - (stuck in a well in L.A.) - and that the Jessica McClure rescue story in 1987 - (stuck in another well in Midland, Texas) - would cement CNN's status as the "go to" station for non-stop news.* In between, she describes the peculiarities of TV - and the vagaries of "UHF" stations on TV sets that once stopped at Channel 13. She chronicles how Ted Turner took over his family's billboard biz after his father's suicide - and built it into a force throughout the South. He bought up broadcast stations - and one of them - Channel 17 in Atlanta - would, thanks to the rise of satellite-driven cable - explode during the late 1970s as "Superstation WTBS" - the first channel with 24-hour programming. Turner felt shutting down each night meant wasted hours, throwing money out of a window. So he filled hours with a mix of old movies, comedy re-runs, baseball games, wrestling matches and infomercials - including weird "news" by Bill Tush - who was sometimes accompanied by "The Unknown Newsman," a guy with a bag over his head.------------* The irony, Napoli writes, is Turner once hated news - in part because he believed it dished out stories which poisoned people against the military (p. 69) - and was built upon an "endless parade of gloom and doom, depicting the worst of humanity, dragging down anyone who tuned in" (p. 110). He even told a group of elite broadcasters that they were guilty of America's "demise," describing ABC, CBS and NBC as a "cartel" feeding people "garbage" (p. 157). CNN president Maurice "Reese" Schonfeld ruefully felt news was what the mighty networks said it was (p. 42).* With the success of Superstation WTBS, Turner decided to use the power of cable to create a 24-hour news station, marketing CNN as an alternative to the news "cartel," telling the New York Times, "Don't you know we're going to bury you?" (p. 158). He was ridiculed.* "Up All Night" is filled with riveting details leading up to CNN's 1980 debut - and how it would be vindicated with its coverage of the 1981 shooting of President Reagan, airing footage copied from the White House press pool feed, from which it was barred (p. 217). Apparently CNN was held in such low regard - that it had to sue for access, which wasn't granted until 1982 (p. 248).------------* It becomes clear by reading Napoli's book - that while Turner gets credit for CNN - its true creator was indeed the aforementioned Maurice "Reese" Wolfe Schonfeld, who designed its format and controlled all content. It would be "Reese" - along with Ted Kavanau and a revolving door of staffers and interns - including the author herself - who would invent the idea of presenting "news as it happens" - and - what's now known as "the 24 hour news cycle."* But they wouldn't know that CNN would eventually capture a global audience of two billion - and that what they began as an impartial news station - would splinter thirty years later - into what Napoli told interviewers this month - would be a place where "speculation" is reported - and where "narratives" and opinions would be "sliced and diced" to boost ratings and revenue.------------* In sum, "Up All Night's" decision to focus on CNN's historic beginnings - and not on what people think of it today - ensures its shelf relevance about how Turner sparked a "news revolution" - "for better or worse" (p. 246). Lisa Napoli's book conjures vivid images of unintentionally chaotic satire - and about how "news became live sports" (p. 172) - creating a nation, she says, of news junkies who are experts about everything. She ties up loose ends occurring after 2001 - and like all great books - "Up All Night" leaves readers wanting more. Grade - A.

With its hilarious anecdotes and amusingly quirky details, this is a fast, fun read. But don't be deceived, it's also a very serious history about a highly pertinent topic. The birth and early days of CNN effectively created today's media environment, and the author provides lots of insight into both how it started and how we got where we are today. I also think liberal readers are going to be quite surprised by Ted Turner's conservative leanings. I lived through a lot of the media evolution that the author covers, but I still learned a ton about what was going on behind the scenes. Journalism junkies will love this, but it's also delightful as an entertaining pop history.

No matter how you regard CNN in 2021, its origin story, rooted in the '70s, is in retrospect astonishing -- and would be impossible to duplicate in today's cartel-controlled corporate media sphere. It's laid out in loving, unsparing detail by Lisa Napoli in Up all Night. Her vivid, affectionate book is more than a company history; it's a funny and evocative snapshot of a vanished media era.Full disclosure: I worked at CNN for close to a decade. It's lovely to see old colleagues pop up in these pages.Lisa frames the four critical factors, and their short-lived confluence, that made CNN possible. There was the wild-and-crazy, anything-goes, shoestring-budget zeitgeist of pre-cable UHF independent television, staffed by eccentrics and outcasts who'd never made it to a network but could conjure creative and technical miracles for peanuts. There was also the rise of cable distribution, which made it possible to challenge the hegemony of NBC, CBS, and ABC, and the advent of satellites and portable video tech, which made remote news reporting more economical, particularly live shots. Most importantly there was Ted Turner, who backed the CNN experiment despite earlier protestations that "I hate the news," and had proved it by making a sarcastic low-rent mockery of pompous TV journalism on his "SuperStation," Atlanta Channel 17.Lisa argues persuasively that without the manic, working-class, defiantly mid-American inventiveness that made Channel 17 hilarious (and a nationwide hit via cable), CNN would not have come to pass. Turner and company were underdogs thumbing their noses at clubby, pinstriped media elites -- a lot of seminal CNN talents on both sides of the camera were recruited from medium-market heartland TV stations. "Ted was imbued with something most media executives in New York did not have: a sense of the world outside Manhattan," Lisa writes.Perspective-wise, something essential was surely lost when CNN headquarters moved from Atlanta to New York. Today it delivers the view from Columbus Circle, literally and figuratively.Forty years later most people in TV get paid a lot more and the audience is enjoying TV a lot less; there are hundreds of cable networks but the total audience shrinks further each year. 500 channels and nothing on, to misquote Springsteen. Politics swamps the news business and polarizes viewers. Since the '90s CNN has bounced from one corporate owner to another -- TimeWarner, AOL, AT&T -- all more focused on profits than the newsgathering mission. (In the '80s when I luckily came to work there, CNN was bleeding significant money, but nobody I knew worried about layoffs; we and Ted were changing the world, and SuperStation profits subsidized us. 15 years later CNN was printing money right and left, but staff worried constantly -- and justifiably -- about layoffs; the profits weren't enough for the network's new corporate masters.) Digital will finish cable one day, as surely as network TV finished Life and the Saturday Evening Post. Ted's dream of unifying the world with live TV news from everywhere? It looks more distant now than when CNN signed on.But for a certain shining period, a bunch of tireless, anti-establishment believers changed the business, and you'll never see their underdog story better told than in the company of Lisa Napoli and Up All Night.No matter what else Ted Turner accomplishes, CNN will surely make the first graf of his obit. Although I left years ago, I, like hundreds of alums, hope the same is true for me. CNN was that important, and I hope Up All Night makes you think so too.

Robert Edward “Ted” Turner III completely changed the world of television news. He is one of the most successful businessmen of the twentieth century. He built a huge media empire, was a startling successful sailor, and is one of the great environmental leaders of our time. Author Lisa Napoli has written a wonderful description of this important man, focusing on the beginnings of the Cable News Network, the first 24-hour television news outlet that changed the face of news forever. Napoli is an excellent researcher and a marvelous writer. This book is full of interesting details and factoids, making it a pleasurable read. I highly recommend this book!

Easy read, informative about CNN

So much to learn about CNN and the history of cable and mainstream television within the USA. Very educational and entertaining.