Excerpt from the 2000 Edward R. Murrow Symposium with Ted Turner

But I had an idea, and I just sat there and watched the years go by, 76, 77, 78, and as 79 rolled in, I said well it doesn't look like anybody else is going to do it and I thought well, why don't you give it -- Gamble everything you got, you know it's going to work. I mean I had some radio stations and they were in small markets and, uh... But I went to New York, You make in sales calls from time to time, and I knew they had all-news radio in New York and it was working there. I knew all-news television would work, because it would, on a cable system it would just be a choice. You could come in at 5 o'clock or 8 o'clock or 9:00 at night when no news was on. The news was only on two and a half hours a day. And I just, it was, people said wasn't that a terrible risk. I said, No I don't think it was a terrible risk at all. I thought it was a lay down, I--I don't, thing is I didn't know how much money it was going to take, and I didn't have very much money, and I knew I didn't have enough to get finished, but I remember reading about Rommel in the desert. You know

they call him the Desert Fox, and he never had enough petrol for his advances, you know. So he had to move fast enough to, uh, to catch the British off-guard and roll them back so fast, they didn't have time to blow up their, uh, fuel dumps. And so he would continue his attack with British fuel. anybody. But that's a gamble because if they would have torched those fuel dumps, his Panzers would have run out of fuel out there in the desert and been sitting ducks for the Royal Air Force. So I had to, but I knew that I would be able to get, once I got on the air I gambled that I'd be able to get money, because it would obviously be such a good idea when people saw it, they, uh, I could get more investors, and that's exactly what, what happened thankfully, because otherwise I would have gone broke. I didn't have enough money to make it a year. I was like these dot com companies, you know, they, they've only got enough money in the bank to make it through the next month. I appreciate, I hope they all make it, and, um, I wish them the very best. Some will I'm sure and some won't. But then

19, and then when I had the idea in 82 or 83 to go global with it, uh, immediately we ran into a buzz saw of, uh, negative reaction from all over the world. You know, the French didn't want American news, you know that, everybody, the Russians, everybody thought that there was going to be imperialism, that the CIA was behind this and they didn't want it in their country and so forth. So that's all that they didn't want an American news organization out there, coming into their country via satellite which couldn't, a satellite signal that couldn't be controlled. And at that time, far less than half the people in the world lived in democracy, far less, I'd say probably only a quarter of the people on the planet were in democracy. Most of South America was not democratic. Of course the former Soviet Union, including China, uh, the eastern bloc, that was not democratic. I mean, the world was not democratic.

So they didn't want it in either because we were from a democratic country, but what I did was to allay their fears as much as possible. First of all, I created something called The World Report. I said, if I include them, by letting them send in news pieces every week and I put them on Sunday afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00, and run them uncensored and agree to take them from every country in the world in there if they long as they get translated into English one way or the other -- they either furnish them to me in English or we translate them into English -- that we would take these news stories from everywhere and we'd run them uncensored. And I had my, I was running CNN at the time, not on a day-to-day basis, but I was setting the policy. Uh, and I had all my news executives in, and I told them what my idea was, and they said you're crazy, you can't do that. I said Why can't I? They said because we'll get pieces from Muammar Gaddafi from Libya about what a rotten, what the great Satan the United States is, we'll get pieces from Castro and

Cuba, we'll get pieces from Russia, we'll get pieces from China telling how good communism is, you know, we'll get all this propaganda. I said great. That'll be terrific. You know people will really want to watch that, nobody's ever seen the, over here has ever seen a commie newscast before, you know. It will be something that nobody's ever seen before, and we'll get credibility from around the world. And I said, and they said, well, we'll resign. I said, well then, just give me your resignations on your way out, because I'll get some people that will do it if you won't. Course nobody resigned and of course it went rather smoothly but that didn't get away with all of the, that didn't do away with all the criticism because...