Ted Turner Made a Mess
The CNN founder turned political news into a 24-hour circus of combative infotainment.
Free Expression is a daily newsletter on American life, politics and culture from the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Sign up and start reading Free Expression today.
By inventing the frenetic world of instant news in the 1980s, Ted Turner got rich but unintentionally impoverished American democracy. Turner, who died Wednesday at 87, founded CNN, the 24-hour Cable News Network. Alas, the constant noise of around-the-clock news undermined reporters’ commitment to “objectivity,” while uncorking a savage partisanship polarizing America.
CNN began broadcasting on June 1, 1980. Ronald Reagan became president seven months later. On March 6, 1981, Walter Cronkite signed off for the last time as the CBS Evening News anchor. His successor, Dan Rather, desperately clutched the cloak of respectability Cronkite wore easily. The cloak would fray amid competing news sources, the rise of “infotainment,” budget cuts and a conservative counterattack against the media’s liberal bias.
A month after the Cronkite-to-Rather generational transition, CNN broke the three-channel universe. In April 1981, CNN sued the three networks and the Reagan administration, demanding equal access to the White House press pool. This suit heralded cable’s ascent. Cable would be in 57% of American homes by 1989, with CNN broadcasting to 51 million American households and more than 80 nations. During the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis, President George H.W. Bush would tell world leaders, “I learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA.”
If Walter Cronkite was American democracy’s ringmaster, cultivating consensus with sober, factual, apolitical reportage, Ted Turner was its blustering, charming P.T. Barnum. He viewed news as profit-generating entertainment. Starting with a local Atlanta television station, Turner fulfilled his “public interest” requirement by broadcasting the news at 3 a.m. He added a co-anchor, “Rex the Wonder Dog,” and a roving “Unknown Announcer” with a paper bag over his head.
Tapping the magic of satellite and cable, Turner parlayed a mediocre UHF station into a national “superstation,” raising his hometown’s profile, boosting the sports franchises he owned and making billions. After a rocky start that had people mocking the “Chaos News Network,” CNN stabilized. Americans soon were steeped in raw news footage, witnessing history as it happened, a contrast to Cronkite’s sculpted news tidbits.
With CNN functioning like the Associated Press, offering constant bulletins, the network news shows approximated magazines, justifying the time lag from occurrence to reportage with slick packaging, editorializing and more speculative stories.
CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter demanded “infotainment” aimed at “the heartland.” Lesley Stahl and other ace reporters grumbled that CBS wasn’t “some second-rate tabloid.” Inevitably, reporters started shouting about the news, as journalists spun, opined, fueled controversy and sought celebrity.
This journalistic Roman Circus made politicians more pugilistic. The volume soared. Performative polarization became the norm. Conflict trumped consensus. Exclamation points elbowed out question marks. Voters and their leaders became addicted to the spectacle.
Committed to covering live action around the globe and around the clock, CNN further nationalized American politics. Yet the spread of cable also fragmented the country. The network oligopoly dissolved. Hundreds of small-niche cable stations competed for viewers. With the big three’s share of the national audience dipping from 85% to 67% by the end of the 1980s, David Letterman quipped: “TV is becoming like radio.”
The U.S. has a long tradition of belligerent politicking, while journalism keeps oscillating between “Dark Ages” of intense partisanship and supposedly more objective “Golden Ages” of playing it straight. But technological breakthroughs have often triggered powerful political and cultural changes. In the 1850s, the telegraph enabled reporters to sell news to all newspapers, forcing them to become more objective. They dropped partisan adjectives in a bid to report “the facts” of a story. Today’s technological pressures—from cable narrowcasting to social-media algorithms—create incentives to mine for gold in the opposite way: tarring rivals and generating outrage.
Ted Turner had a true pioneering spirit. He understood that in inventing the future, entrepreneurs must be bold, daring and impervious to criticism. His attempt to colorize classic movies in the 1980s generated great controversy. Yet the way he colorized American politics did much more lasting damage.
Mr. Troy is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem and the author of “Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s.”
 | A guest post by
|