ME AND TED AGAINST THE WORLD: THE UNAUTHORIZED STORY OF THE FOUNDING OF CNN.(Review)

ME AND TED AGAINST THE WORLD: THE UNAUTHORIZED STORY OF THE FOUNDING OF CNN BY REESE SCHONFELD. HARPERCOLLINS. 407 PP. $26

"We will stay on the air till the end of the world and then we will cover the story and sign off playing `Nearer My God to Thee.'" That's the mission statement Ted Turner offered to anybody who'd listen when CNN was being launched almost twenty-one years ago. So far, the all-news cable network is on track to keep its founder's promise. It reaches more than a billion people worldwide in twelve languages and employs 150 full-fledged correspondents in forty-two cities -- more than ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox combined. For most of those two decades, CNN has been a major destination for viewers when big stories happen: the gulf war, the death of Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crash, the disputed 2000 presidential election.

CNN had a monopoly on national cable news before MSNBC (a joint effort of NBC and Microsoft) came along in July 1996, followed that same year by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel. Those networks' growing influence and popularity, along with CNN's own sclerosis and declining audience, led to the events of mid-January when an internal CNN memo announced a "long overdue ... radical transformation" in which 400 staffers were fired -- some of them being led ignominiously back to their desks by security officers and told to pack up and be off the premises within the hour.

The arc of CNN's tumultuous story is described with zest, lamentation, humor, bile, and more than a soupcon of score-settling and self-justification by Reese Schonfeld in Me and Ted Against the World: the Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN. The book went to press before the firings, and before AOL and Time Warner (which has owned CNN since 1996) won regulators' approval for a merger that makes CNN a mere cog in the world's largest media machine, and which renders Ted Turner -- who expended sweat, blood, and a major fortune bringing his brainchild to maturity -- a forlorn empty-nester.

Turner asked Schonfeld in 1978 if an all-news cable channel was feasible, and if he'd create it. Schonfeld answered yes and yes. He'd been knocking around the newsreel and TV news business since the 1950s and was ready for the main chance. On paper (but only on paper), he and Turner were well-matched. Both had enormous energy and a buccaneer spirit. Turner had been tossed out of Brown University for having a girl in his room; Schonfeld got kicked out of Harvard Law for gambling. Turner was a champion sailboat racer, winner of the America's Cup; Schonfeld, while an undergraduate at Dartmouth, was a national collegiate bridge champion. Turner cared nothing about television news, and decided on a news channel only because other cable entrepreneurs had coopted movies, sports, and sitcom reruns. Schonfeld was a devout theorist and practitioner of the newsgathering crafts.

Turner informed Schonfeld that CNN "is going to make us the two most powerful men in the world." There was one hitch. Turner had no money. No spending money, anyway. His assets were a tangle of indebtedness. While he begged and borrowed, Schonfeld went ahead and set up headquarters in a derelict Atlanta building that once was a Russian-Jewish country club. He imported a hundred workers tinder twenty-five years of age to labor in grunt jobs for low, earn-while-you-learn, non-union wages, which turned the CNN offices into a hotbed of sex, drugs, and rock `n' roll. Casting about for staffers with some experience, he landed Daniel Schorr, Bernard Shaw, Mary Alice Williams, Bill Zimmerman, Kathleen Sullivan, Lou Dobbs, Mike Boettcher, Myron Kandel, Dan Dorfman, Jim Miklaszewski, Robin Leach, and a twenty-three-year-old Katie Couric.

By launch day, June 1, 1980, Turner had expended $134.5 million in start-up costs, and was panicked about CNN's prospects. Writes Schonfeld: "He was going into a business he never liked, and about which he knew little. He had every right to be scared. Hell, I was scared, and I knew what I was doing." Back then, less than 20 percent of U.S. homes had cable, and CNN was in only 1.7 million of those -- less than the 3.5 million Turner had promised advertisers. Nineteen-eighty was a presidential election year, and CNN charged into the gladiatorial arena against the three established broadcast networks. At the party conventions in Detroit and New York, anchorman Shaw occupied a tiny open booth near the rafters, and was careful not to lean back in his chair lest he fall a hundred feet into the audience. Politicians declined to be interviewed because they'd never heard of CNN. One CNN staffer called the convention coverage "a four-car pile-up."