Up All Night

Napoli Lisa Napoli

Description

The wild inside story of the birth of CNN and dawn of the age of 24-hour news How did we get from an age of dignified nightly news broadcasts on three national networks to the age of 24-hour news channels and constantly breaking news? The answer-thanks to Ted Turner and an oddball cast of cable television visionaries, big league rejects, and nonunion newbies-can be found in the basement of an abandoned country club in Atlanta. Because it was there, in the summer of 1980, that this motley crew launched CNN. Lisa Napoli's Up All Night is an entertaining inside look at the founding of the upstart network that set out to change the way news was delivered and consumed, and succeeded beyond even the wildest imaginings of its charismatic and uncontrollable founder. Mixing media history, a business adventure story, and great characters, this is a fun book on the making of the world we live in now.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 12 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683358268
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by Lisa Napoli
Radio Shangri-La: What I Discovered on My Accidental Journey to the Happiest Kingdom on Earth
Ray Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away

Copyright 2020 Lisa Napoli
Cover 2020 Abrams
Published in 2020 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939895
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4306-1
eISBN: 978-1-68335-826-8
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
In memory of my father, Vincent, a news junkie before anyone called it that and For the other Ted, my one and only, who voluntarily gave up the sets
Someday, I m going to be the first person in the history of the world to talk to everyone. I ll be able to talk to all the world s leaders and bring peace to the world through television.
-Ted Turner
Contents
March 2001
CHAPTER ONE: The Little Girl in the Well, 1949
CHAPTER TWO: The Lunatic Fringe
CHAPTER THREE: Girdle Round the Earth
CHAPTER FOUR: Watch This Channel Grow!
CHAPTER FIVE: Captain Outrageous
CHAPTER SIX: No News Is Good News
CHAPTER SEVEN: Every Drop of Blood
CHAPTER EIGHT: Reese s Pieces
CHAPTER NINE: Until the End of the World
CHAPTER TEN: Duck Hunting with Fidel
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Little Girl in the Well, 1987
AFTERWORD: June 2000
APPENDIX: Timeline
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
March 2001
His handsome face tired, his silver hair and mustache now fully white-his speech as bombastic as when reporters first anointed him the Mouth of the South, a nickname he despised-Ted Turner grabbed the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism as he ascended the stage at the Forum of Public Affairs at Harvard University.
He found the honor amusing. Before him, it had been bestowed on luminary broadcast journalists like Ted Koppel, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, and Lesley Stahl-venerable practitioners whose networks Ted had charged after with nuclear force, changing the very nature of TV. Though he d never reported a story in his life-though he d long ago derided news as evil -he supposed he had been a journalist of sorts. After all, he still drew a paycheck from a media company, Time Warner, which had acquired his Turner Broadcasting years earlier, including the service for which he was being feted that night-CNN, a source of news to two billion people around the globe. Heck, way back in grade school, he d hawked newspapers at a streetcar stop for a penny a pop. Didn t that count as journalism?
Even as a kid, he d been a salesman above all else, shouting, EXTRA! to the passersby to suggest that the latest issue promised big, breaking news.
It wasn t an extra, he confessed to the audience, who lapped up his irreverence, but I was trying to sell these goddamned papers.
After a few too many drinks at the pre-event dinner party, he propped up the framed commendation on the seat of a chair next to the podium. The citation proceeded to fall to the floor. He left it there.
It won t stand up, he said, and I m having trouble doing the same myself.
As much as the cocktails, the dismal facts of life since the dawn of the new millennium had knocked him off-kilter.
When clocks ticked into the year 2000, the world had not imploded, as many had expected it might, but Ted s universe had.
Days into the new year, his third wife, the actress Jane Fonda, had moved out. He d honored her wish that he not run for president of the United States, a job he wanted if only to promote his passion for environmental preservation. Fonda had said she d leave him if he ran, so he didn t-she went ahead and split anyway. He loved her still.
The best lay I ever had, he d lamented to the dean s wife earlier that evening-the ultimate compliment by this inveterate ladies man.
Just a few days after that personal loss, a different life-altering bombshell exploded, this one dropped by Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin. Levin had altered the course of Ted s life before. In 1975, he d sparked a media revolution when he catapulted a faltering pay-cable service called HBO into space-then a brand-new frontier. When Ted learned about this pioneering use of a satellite to transmit a television signal, he was inspired to make the copycat move for his little independent station in Atlanta. This changed everything for him, and for the station, and, ultimately, for all of television.
Swept up in this new century by the irrational exuberance of the World Wide Web, Levin, now Ted s boss, had negotiated the sale of their company to a preposterous suitor, the red-hot America Online. Ted had his doubts, but he no longer had any say. Wall Street so disapproved of this merger that Time Warner s stock tanked. In the past months alone, his personal fortune had shrunk by $3 billion.
Just a week earlier, he d suffered another incalculable loss-of power. He d been shunted aside into an emeritus role. The networks he d created, including CNN, would no longer fall under his control.
Absent his job, his wife, or a healthy slice of his fortune, now he had to stand tall here in Cambridge at the august university that had, decades earlier, rejected his application for admission. 1
If I had come to college here, God knows what I would have accomplished, he mused, as the audience erupted in laughter. Because, aside from the recent tumult, no one could argue that his achievements had been anything but formidable.
In introducing Ted, his Harvard host extolled him as a visionary in the spirit of the savior of the venerable New York Times , Adolph Ochs, or, better yet, Elvis. Elvis Presley changed music . But Ted had done one better. He d changed America .
Yet few in that audience remembered-if they ever knew at all-the improbable empire-building that had emboldened Ted to believe he could start the very first all-news channel in 1980. Hardly anyone thought the idea could work, much less last-much less that a rogue like him could pull it off. Then, there was the parade of obstacles that had threatened to derail him every step of the way.
That evening, the audience at Harvard wasn t concerned with history, especially history they didn t even know. They were worried about CNN s future and what would become of the news network they relied on now that Ted would no longer be a part of it. Layoffs had just been announced, and the accelerating power of the Internet loomed large. How would that change CNN? a student asked. It already had, Ted responded, his voice tinged with regret. But, he added, he had no crystal ball. All he could do was hope for the best.
Before the digital revolution unleashed a never-ending tsunami of information; back before videotape and portable camera gear and time-code editing and live shots allowed television news to rev more quickly and vividly than ever; way back when the world was a slower, quieter place and television s crackling black-and-white glow began to muscle radio for mindshare, Ted had been a little boy with a ferocious disciplinary problem about to be shipped off to military school, selling newspapers to commuters on their way home from work-fretting, as he voraciously memorized the stories of kings and battles and explorers, that there were no new worlds left for him to conquer. It was as if the medium of television was waiting for him to come along to upend it.
I was like Columbus when he left Spain for the new world, Ted told the amused audience, wistful for that strange and wonderful and faraway moment in time. He didn t know where he was going when he started, he didn t know where he was when he got there, and he didn t know where he d been when he got back.

1 After his rejection from Harvard, Ted attended Brown, a school to which he reminded the audience he d just gifted $100 million-the same sum he d given Jane Fonda after she d left. She turned around and pledged $12.5 million of that to fund a gender studies program at Harvard s Graduate School of Education. (The award was later rescinded for various reasons, most notably the collapse of the stock.) Goddamn it, Ted groused. I want you to know it s my money. I love her still.
CHAPTER ONE
The Little Girl in the Well, 1949
That late Friday afternoon in April, before the world shook for one family and shrank for everyone else, the sun beamed clear over an open field in San Marino, California, a perfect day for carefree outdoor play. Two sets of cousins frolicked in a footrace with a fox terrier named Jeepers, while their mothers prepared dinner, keeping an eye on the kids out the kitchen window.
At a quarter after four, the day turned instantly dark, as the kids stomped inside-only three of them.
Where s Kathy? asked the girl s mother, Alice, about her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Neither Kathy s sister, Barbara, age nine, nor her cousins Stanley, ten, and Gus, five, had an answer.
Alice jumped in her car and rode up the street, assuming the little girl had strayed toward the nearby school and a swing set she loved. Not a trace of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Kathy Fiscus. The family frantically fanned out across the field, calling her name. As they approached an uncapped well, fourteen inches wide, circled by weeds, they could hear her cries beneath the earth.
She s here! Gus shouted.
Police and fire crews were summoned. Awaiting their arrival, the frantic mother dropped a telephone cord into th