In his recent autobiography, Ted Turner regales us with a host of facts and feisty anecdotes about his amazing life, covering his childhood, his business career, his family life and philanthropic work. What is so refreshing about this book is the way it is written. Ted Turner is disarmingly honest, full of humor and energy.
He has been described as “transparent, unabashed, unafraid, persistent and spontaneous, with a lot of wisdom and with the ability to get to the core issues”. What most of us ignore is that Ted Turner had to work very hard and along the road to success, he also suffered a number of setbacks and tragedies: His parents divorced, his father committed suicide and his younger sister, Mary Jean died at seventeen from lupus.
Ted Turner was sent off to a boarding school when he was four and from the age of eight, his father, who believed in strict discipline and in the value of hard work, made him work during his summer holidays. He began at four hours a day and by the time he was twelve, he was working forty two and a half hours a week. Moreover, his schooling at a military academy was the key to his development as a person and a leader. He excelled in debates and was instrumental in helping his school win the state championship by reinterpreting a statement which caught all the other debate teams completely unprepared:
“Looking back on the way we reinterpreted that resolution, I can now see the roots of the way I tackled many of my business challenges. Confronted with a problem I’ve always looked for an unconventional angle and approach. Nothing sneaky, nothing illegal or unethical, just turning the issue on its head and shifting the advantage to our side,” Turner explains.
Turner was also endowed with an incredible energy channeled toward trying to be the best in business and sailing (he won the America’s Cup). He had a folding bed in his office so he could literally work until he was completely exhausted. He inherited his father’s billboard business in 1963 but he immediately recognized television’s advertising potential and started buying TV stations.
Throughout his career, Ted Turner has been criticized for his poor negotiating skills and overpaying for things but he still believes that his quick, aggressive bids secured him the deals and that even his higher-priced purchases were good investments.
At the beginning, his cable TV company generated anger, fear and suspicion as its signal penetrated new markets. A manager of a Florida station even asked him not to enter his territory but Turner was already dreaming of covering the United States, and later the world. In the mid-seventies, in the face of a growing opposition from Hollywood, the Sports Leagues, the broadcasts networks, as well as local stations all over the United States, Turner was convinced, he was, the underdog, and that television needed an independent voice offering more choice and more variety:
“It was really an exciting time. Cable and satellite delivery were about to revolutionize the way people consumed television and viewers’ range of choice would increase in a way that few could have imagined… By 1978 it had been several years since I first considered an all news channel and still no one had done it, so I decided to consider launching one myself”, he says.
He chose the name of this all-news channel even before it was marketed. Emphasizing the word cable, he called it the Cable News Network. As incredible as it might seem, no formal research on the viability of a twenty-four-hour cable news was conducted but Turner rightly thought that if viewers liked watching news on television, they would welcome the option to do it at any hour of the day.
CNN was officially launched on June 1, 1980. Although he ventured into this new business without sufficient capital to see it through to profitability, Turner had decided that CNN would be the star. Lou Dobbs, (anchor and managing editor of CNN’s Lou Dobbs tonight) met him in January 1980, and was immediately impressed by Ted Turner: “His enthusiasm was infectious and he was absolutely the definition of charismatic. He was in super sales mode and explained to me that CNN was going to be the greatest thing in the history of Western civilization!”
Reality was harsh: Losses accumulated and at one point, the network was nicknamed “Chicken Noodle News”. But Turner never gave up and he acknowledges that one of the reason he has been so successful is that he competed against people who were bigger and stronger but less committed than he was.
Fidel Castro was such an enthusiastic viewer that he invited Turner to visit him. Upon his return, filled with the desire to understand more about other cultures and political systems, he worked on distribution deals to make CNN the first global television network.
CNN’s breakthrough came with Operation Desert Storm.
For the first time, a war was being covered, live: “CNN scored the journalistic scoop of the century… CNN’s coverage of Operation Desert Storm was the network’s proudest moment,” says Turner.
In the final years of the 1990’s, the Internet begins another media revolution but Turner doubts if he has the energy to start a new business all over again. He reluctantly signs the AOL merger. From there on, he faces a host of setbacks. He is fired from his post and although he is named vice chairman, he soon discovers that he has no duties. Increasingly disappointed and angry with a company accused of dishonesty, he eventually resigns from AOL Time Warner.
He is 67 years old with plenty of time and energy left. Committed to channel his resources toward tackling important issues, he is particularly concerned with nuclear annihilation and climate change: “A combination of things will have to happen if we’re going to combat the global climate crisis, but most of all we need good leadership. Political leaders have to make this issue a priority… We live in a society of instant gratification and short attention spans, and these attitudes carry through to our government and business leaders… voters want immediate results and politicians want to keep their jobs, so hunkering down to make tough, long-term decisions is not an easy task,” he explains.
Until the very last pages, Turner who is now 71 still dazzles us with his energy and zest for life. For years he was too busy to consider stopping to write a book but he already hopes to accomplish enough in the next years to write a sequel.
Ted Turner often seems larger than life but in “Call Me Ted,” we discover a human being intend on making the world a better place.