The passing of US TV mogul Ted Turner (see Thursday edition) will not have gone unnoticed especially by -former- broadcasters in the region and elsewhere. In addition to acquiring Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise the Atlanta Braves, he launched his Atlanta station later known as TBS via satellite to show the team’s games nationwide and abroad via satellite.
More importantly, he established Cable News Network (CNN) when just about everybody in the business said a 24-hour news service wouldn’t work. Turner and his associates proved them wrong also due to live coverage of dramatic major worldwide events at the time.
They also looked across the border, so In addition to the domestic channel added an international version was added. With a need for around-the-clock news seven days per week, depending only on correspondents in global hotspots like the major American networks at the time with daily newscasts like ABC, CBS and NBC might not be enough and costly at that.
They came up with a weekly programme called CNN World Report and approached televisions stations just about everywhere with an offer to tell their own stories to the outside community by submitting three-minute items on tape. While the magazine-format segment was mostly on CNN International which not many American cable operators carried and accents of those doing the reporting in English sometimes made it hard to understand, but the initiative cemented the relationship between CNN and broadcasters from around the globe so that if anything big happened n their neck of the woods, local access was quickly gained.
They would organise an annual Contributor’s Conference, inviting these partners to Atlanta at reduced accommodation rates for exchanges with well-known news-makers, often combined with a meal, as well as discussions on the profession like -for example- the pros and cons of government-owned broadcasters, combined with excursions including a Braves game.
The author of this column was there several times on behalf of TeleCuraçao and although “name-dropping” is not a habit, among those involved were Bill Clinton Jessy Jackson, Jacques Cousteau, Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young.
Beyond television, Turner invented the Goodwill Games as an alternative open to all, without the political boycotts and exclusions that plagued the Olympics back then. He was known as believer in the “Global Village” concept as opposed to isolationism.
On behalf of the Caribbean broadcasting fraternity, we salute a true pioneer.
