‘News will be the star’: Ted Turner’s extraordinary uphill battle to launch CNN | CNN Business

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