By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — Banks scoffed. Potential partners rejected him. Newspaper owners mocked the idea. But Ted Turner persevered and won.
Turner faced an extraordinary uphill battle to launch CNN in 1980. Before the network became an institution, a shorthand for 24/7 breaking news around the world, it was a dare that many people considered unserious and some derided as “Chicken Noodle News.”
Turner willed the network into being at great personal and financial risk.
“I just wanted to see if we could do it — like Christopher Columbus,” he once said. “When you do something that’s never been done before, sail on uncharted waters and don’t know where you’re going, you’re not sure what you’re going to find when you get there, but at least you’re going somewhere.”
Turner saw a huge opening in the television marketplace, a chance to supersede the ABC, NBC and CBS broadcast networks that only allotted half an hour for news at night.
To the broadcasters, and many others, the premise seemed absurd: Who would watch the news at 2 p.m.? Or 2 a.m.? And who would pay for it?
But Turner thought “the big, powerful networks were captives of market studies,” Hank Whittemore wrote in 1990’s “CNN: The Inside Story.”
The broadcasters “took poll after poll of the demand out there, and all their surveys plainly showed that news was a clunker,” Whittemore wrote.
Turner didn’t believe much in market research. He trusted his gut. And he bet that if he created a supply of 24/7 news, the demand would follow.
He also wanted to stick it to the broadcasters he viewed as smug and self-satisfied. “They loved having just a three-channel environment,” Turner said. Turner loved the chance to disrupt the entire industry.
So in 1978, he talked with associates about producing a never-ending newscast — a costly, round-the-clock effort built for a cable world that had not yet really arrived.
“I’m gonna call it Cable News Network,” he told Reese Schonfeld, CNN’s founding president.
Turner — who took over his father’s billboard company and expanded it into films and TV — admitted he knew “diddley-squat” about the news business. He brashly claimed he disliked the news altogether until he began to market CNN.
Crucially, Turner recruited people like Schonfeld who knew who to hire and what to order. But it was a battle every step of the way. Turner and his colleagues had fights over satellites, staffing needs, distribution strategies and everything else.
Recruiting journalists to the startup was one of the steepest challenges, Turner recalled in his memoir “Call Me Ted.” But the mogul’s maverick attitude appealed to some just as it scared off others.
“We didn’t often get people who were at the height of their careers,” he recalled, “but we did find some promising up-and-comers who were attracted by CNN and the chance to be on the ground floor of something new, ambitious, and exciting.”
Some of those new hires might not have realized how far Turner was financially stretching to get the network on the air. Turner risked his personal wealth, knowing he barely had any runway to keep it going, and later said he “stayed just a step ahead of the bankers.”
Turner was “a wild man,” a “go-for-broke idea guy whose craziest idea, perhaps, was a global television network,” one of CNN’s original anchors, Mary Alice Williams, said in a statement Wednesday.
His vision, she said, was a network “that could connect the whole world so that all of us could see each other. See our shared common challenges and share solutions. In the belief that maybe — maybe! — there’d be a chance at peace in this troubled world.”
The launch was set for June 1, 1980. A combined Armed Forces Band performed at the ceremony outside CNN’s Techwood campus, a former country club on Techwood Drive in Atlanta, Georgia.