COVER STORY
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-aflfiliated 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