CNN debuted 35 years ago today, and before it was an iconic — and sometimes controversial — 24/7 news network and one of Atlanta's flagship brands, it was a thinly financed curiosity, as likely to break new ground as crash and burn.
All of this according to the New York Times write-up on Ted Turner's network, published the week of its 1980 debut, which you can read in full here.
"The Cable News Network represents a tremendous gamble," the Times' Tony Schwartz wrote then, after describing the network's headquarters in an "enormous antebellum-style mansion" near Georgia Tech.
"It could eventually evolve into a money machine, reaching tens of millions of homes at a fraction of what it costs to run a major network. But there is no precedent for an all-news station."
Looking back now, after CNN rewrote the rules of TV news, it's weird to be reminded of the widespread trepidation the project faced. (One executive worried to the Times that CNN "is certainly an interesting idea, but the question is how they'll execute it. I don't think people want to just watch some guy rip and read the news off the wires.")
As CNN's founder, Turner was the story's central interview, and he gave quotes while "pacing up and down his cluttered Atlanta office and interrupting his own running monologue only to spit tobacco juice into a plastic cup."
A successful businessman before the network's debut, Schwartz introduced him as "the owner of three American professional sports teams, all of which lose money, and of WTBS in Atlanta, an immensely profitable sports and entertainment 'superstation' that was his first venture into cable broadcasting."
Turner, Schwartz wrote, operated with a philosophy that blends "fierce patriotism, reverence for hard work and individual accomplishment, and an optimist's visceral aversion to pessimists."
Of course, as Schwartz wrote sentences later, "For all his capacity to charm, Mr. Turner is utterly self-absorbed."
As for CNN itself, Schwartz wrote that the challenges were plentiful and the revenue sources much less so: "CNN will be attempting to offer six times the amount of news that each of the three networks provide, at one fifth the cost, and with a total staff about the size of a network Washington bureau."
But the rest, as they say, was history. Just don't tell Turner.
"If he goes broke, he figures he can retire to his farm in South Carolina," Schwartz wrote. "But even if his network is successful, he suspects there's a perfectly good likelihood of a world war." (Turner prepared for that, too.)
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