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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 many fold, 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,