Screen Shot 2020-08-27 at 10.03.49 PM.png

It’s hard to imagine a time before 24-hour news. Today it’s nearly impossible to escape the perpetual onslaught of the news-cycle. But there was a time when people thought that a 24-hours news channel was a crazy idea. It took an eccentric, advertising entrepreneur to transform his family business into a pioneering cable television station that would change the world. Lisa Napoli’s Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of the 24-Hour News (Abrams) evocatively illustrates just how much the news has changed in the 40 years since the advent of CNN and round-the-clock broadcasts.

Up All Night follows the life and times of media mogul and celebrated yachtsman Ted Turner. The book is fast-paced and chock-full of fascinating tidbits and hilarious anecdotes. Napoli tells the incredible origin story of CNN and its offbeat team of founders, showing how Ted Turner earned his infamous nickname “The Mouth of the South.”

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Napoli is a seasoned journalist who began her career as an unpaid teenage intern at CNN's New York bureau in the summer of 1981. She’s worked at The New York Times, Marketplace, MSNBC, and KCRW. She’s written two previous books, Radio Shangri-La and Ray & Joan. Now, she’s working on a book about the founding mothers of NPR, to be published next year. She also produces Gracefully, a podcast about aging.

Q: You began your career as a summer intern in the New York bureau of CNN in 1981, right after Ted Turner launched it, and you have worked as a journalist for quite a while, so why did you think now was the time to tell the origin story of the network?

A: Three reasons. CNN turned 40 on June 1st this year, and milestones are always good pegs.

CNN is (as anyone conscious knows) in the crosshairs of much current vitriol, and while I don’t deal with the current situation in the book, it seemed a good time to explain the roots of all-news (especially since Ted Turner was neither a news junkie nor a stark raving liberal lunatic, as some seem to believe, when he launched CNN.)

Lastly, my father, who was a news junkie, though not a journalist, died a few years ago, and that made me start musing about how the heck I got into broadcasting early on (though I really wanted to work at a newspaper) and why the heck did I leave our home in Brooklyn. This book isn’t one iota personal, but doing the work on it was helpful for me as I grieved.

Q: You interviewed so many people who were involved in the launch of CNN. Did you get a sense that they believe CNN has fulfilled its original ambition or has strayed from it?

A: Both. The originals who launched CNN were immensely proud to have pulled it off, especially given the myriad obstacles before them that indicated they would not. (Not the least of which was that cable barely existed then, and no one was sure anyone had any interest in watching 24-7 news.)

Fast forward 40 years to the polarizing world of cable news and the disintegration of journalism as they knew it, and no one could possibly think the original mission has sustained.

It’s super important to remember (or simply to understand) how absolutely different the news media landscape was then versus now. Broadcast-wise, it was a desert.

Q: What about Ted Turner? Didn’t he despise television at the beginning?

A: When Ted Turner got into television, which he did after being in billboards and then venturing into radio, it wasn’t by design as much as by accident—and it was always from the sales point of view, not because he was a journalist.

After finding himself with a crummy little UHF TV station, and starting to think about the medium he didn’t much consume, he began to crusade (as others had before him) against the network triopoly over the American mindshare. He hated the violence and the nudity (which was amusing, given his eye for the ladies.) And he had no time or patience for TV news.

TV was evil he said, and ruining society. (Turns out, he was on to something . . . .)

But as soon as he started to see the power of it all . . . .

Q: What did you draw from your experience writing about another huge company – McDonald’s – that you found helpful to writing about CNN?

A: In many ways there are fascinating similarities between the two companies. (Although the problems McDonald’s had at the start with its franchise model were more similar to that of NPR and its affiliates. For that you’ll have to wait for my next book!)

For one thing, it’s incredibly hard to imagine that either company ever struggled, but each, in fact, did falter terribly at the start, because they were inventing industries as they did that no one believed would sustain. Finding investors who believed in either was difficult.

Q: You write “as the old guard [Network News] argued that the new guard [Cable News] did a disservice to the industry, the new guard argued that the old guard did a disservice to the audience.” Now cable news is the old guard and the new guard is social media. To whom is the new guard is doing a disservice?

A: HUMANITY. Intelligence. Our focus.

Heck, I guess those are all the same thing, in the end, right?

Q: Up All Night is about someone who harnessed new technologies to defy convention and change the world. What do you think people on the cutting edge of technology today can learn from Ted Turner and the story of CNN?

A: Be careful what you wish for if you’re hoping lots of people get their hands on what you create. If people are freaked out about Facebook, imagine what happens next with Artificial Intelligence?

Q: 24-hour news channels have become highly partisan. What do you think Ted Turner and his co-founders would feel about this?

A: I wouldn’t deign to speak for anyone. But I do know that the late Reese Schonfeld, the first president of CNN (who just died last week at age 88) was very vocal in his unhappiness about the network’s permutations.

Ted Turner more famously talked about the disastrous marriage of AOL and Time Warner. Remember, he was never a journalist—always a businessman—and that union was a nightmare for him personally and professionally.

Q: Ted Turner’s goal was to “build up a global communications system that helps humanity come together.” It seems that the opposite has happened. How did it go so wrong?

A: What went wrong? The ultra-partisan Fox News Channel started (16 years after CNN arrived on the scene) and ultimately, the new chiefs at CNN decided to pivot to match their lowest-common-denominator brand of “news.” Which sadly has led, especially lately, to blockbuster ratings, all but guaranteeing it’ll never end.

Bigger picture, what went wrong is that people got lazy and started watching more, and thinking for themselves and reading less.

Q: You have an eye for hilarious stories the reveal the network and those who launched it. Is there one that seems to sum up the CNN story?

A: (Thank you!) The image of Mad Dog Ted Kavanau, the senior producer, standing on a desk in the old country club renovated as CNN’s headquarters, with that gun strapped to his shin, mobilizing his troops . . . that and zany Bill Tush, Turner’s first “anchorman.”

Q: Do you watch CNN? And how do you get your news?

A: I neither own a television (I gave it away after 9/11) nor do I have any desire to consume broadcast news. Too noisy.

I read the NY Times, recently re-subscribed to The Economist (which I should never have let lapse) and try to remember what I once heard a monk say: The best way to read the news is let it sit in a stack and read it weeks or months later.

Q: And let’s hear a bit about your process. Do you write as you report, have a snappy system for keeping events and characters straight? Music, coffee?

A: Oh god, I’m writing another book (about the founding mothers of NPR, to be published next year at the 50th anniversary of All Things Considered) and the idea of listening to music while I do anything makes my head hurt. How do people do that?!?!?

I do have some sort of system, but I’m not sure I could ever describe it. It involves killing many trees, lots of pencils, and, pre-pandemic, the therapeutic aid of Thai massage.

I dream of what it must be like for the A-listers and professors who have research assistants. But as a Z-lister, I’ve become quite deft at what’s necessary for these group biographies: 12-hour days, disorganized organization, stacks of books, sleuthing out people. In my next life, I’ll go to library school and learn to mimic the archivists whom I so admire.

Lucy Posner is a senior at Vassar College, majoring in media studies with a minor in creative writing. She is based in New York City.