Playboy Interview: Ted Turner

What to make of a bawdy sailor who revolutionized cable television? How to react to a millionaire baseball-team owner whose antics get him more press attention than any of his players? What about this fast-living swash-buckler who wants to turn America into his own vision of goodness and family virtue? Who is this guy, anyway?

Those are but a few of the questions that lead one to the doorstep of Ted Turner, the Atlanta television-and-sports entrepreneur who turned the Atlanta Braves into winners and his Cable News Network into the wild card of television programing. He is the man Time magazine profiled last year when it chose a cover subject to explain the upheaval generated by the rise of cable TV and the fragmentation of the vast American television market. It was he who shook the broadcast community last winter with aggressive overtures to consummate a merger with one of the three major networks that would have made him the largest stockholder. And, as this interview suggests, Turner may not intend to limit his ambitions to television.

WhenPlayboyfirst interviewed him in 1978, it was largely because of his athletic prowess as the skipper of the winning yacht in the 1977 America's Cup race--and as the "Mouth of the South," the fast-talking, colorful sybarite from Georgia who charmed or outraged nearly everyone he met. A man of very real athletic achievements who shocked the staid community of Newport with his carousing behavior, Turner was also the owner of an insignificant U.H.F. station in Atlanta.

The channel's most popular show was a Saturday heft-and-hype spectacle called "Georgia Championship Wrestling." News was treated as comedy and was aired at three or four A.M., when, as Turner explained toPlayboyat the time, "We had a 100 percent audience share"--since there were no other Atlanta stations on the air all night.

Then Turner had the insight that has made him a hero to cable television and a visionary in his time: He discovered the geosynchronous orbit, the positioning of a communications satellite, or "bird," in a permanent location above the earth so that, its transponders may be used on a 24-hour-per-day basis by anyone willing to pay the rent on the satellite. Turner instantly understood the bird's extraordinary possibilities: A video signal rises to the satellite in a straight line but returns to the earth as if it were an umbrella-shaped rain shower that covered the hemisphere.

Turner hit upon the innovative and then-unproved trick of beaming his low-cost sports-and-entertainment fare to program-hungry cable systems around the country via the satellite. His programs were low-profit but hardy perennials: superannuated reruns from his library of 4000 movies and discontinued serials, plus lots of sports--chiefly his own two losing ball clubs, the Braves and the N.B.A.'s Atlanta Hawks. Suddenly, he was selling "Leave It to Beaver" and live baseball in such faraway places as Hawaii and Alaska. With typical bravado, he called his new national channel a superstation. Turner's daring new step helped accelerate the spread of cable hookups throughout the country and eventually became the money source that financed the rest of his growing empire.

Yet few look Turner's inroads seriously. During his first "Playboy Interview," even he characterized his operation as a "nitwork," a word he now gleefully uses to describe his adversaries, the three large broadcast networks. His hardware at the time consisted of the highest television tower in the Southeast, a billboard-painting operation on the back lot and a single earth-station microwave dish attended by a lone technician in a house trailer outside Atlanta; he drove our interviewer down a rutted road deep into the woods to show it off. Turner's attitude toward news was that it was all bad and that the public was better off watching reruns of "Gilligan's Island."

Then came the Cable News Network. As he explains in this interview. Turner began to realize that with the cable channels saturated with movies and sports, one obvious product was not yet being marketed on a full-time basis to cable subscribers: news, perhaps the hottest entertainment of all. Typically, Turner defied conventional business wisdom--Time, Inc., had declined to get into full-lime news-casting because it was considered too costly--and decided to plunge headlong into Cable News Network within a period of months. He mortgaged the farm, so to speak, rerouting all his superstation profits into the development of a world-wide news network housed in Turner Broadcasting System's new headquarters, a Taralike mansion that was once the center of a posh Atlanta country club. In June 1980, Turner put CNN on the air with bombast and fanfare, and it has never gone off since.

The man whose remarkable business odyssey has led him into this epic fray was born 44 years ago in Cincinnati, the son of an ambitious father whose own parents had lost their land in South Carolina during the Depression. Turner's father encouraged his son's sense of destiny by the very name he gave him: Robert Edward Turner III, a title worthy of a Confederate aristocrat/soldier and a tradition Turner has continued by naming his own first son Robert Edward Turner IV.

When he was a boy, Turner's family moved South and placed him in military schools, which provided the background that has made him a lover of military tradition and war classics. He literally fought his way to prominence at Georgia Military Academy and at McCallie School in Chattanooga before moving on to Brown University in Rhode Island. There, he studied the classics over his father's protest and was finally booted out of school for assorted outrages involving girlfriends and, once, for incinerating his own fraternity float.

It was Turner senior's suicide when his son was 24 that set the course for the rest of the young man's business life. Turner recovered the family billboard business that his father, deep in debt, had sold shortly before putting a gun to his head. He soon demonstrated the attributes of the riverboat entrepreneur that characterize him today: He purchased a failing Atlanta U.H.F. station but quickly had the wrestling-and-reruns market all to himself when the only U.H.F. competition concluded that Atlanta was a nonmarket. It was through the unlikely back channel of a station whose main studio set was a wrestling ring that Turner became one of the country's most powerful media chiefs.

While many network executives still dismiss him as little more than a burr under their corporate saddles, they have also paid him the ultimate compliment of imitation, expanding their news programing into late-night hours and beginning their morning shows an hour earlier. Some have adopted the national call-in format pioneered by CNN. ABC even joined Westinghouse to mount a direct cable competitor, the Satellite News Channels.

But Turner is not content to take on the giants of the American communications industry with his slingshot alone; there is also his lip. The Mouth of the South has taken his act on the road and become the most caustic, and vociferous critic of the prosperous and entrenched broadcast industry in all its history. Turner's sense of the histrionic has not failed him; he unhesitatingly compares his adversaries to the Gestapo and to those who deservedly lost their heads during the French Revolution.

While acting the role of pious spokesman in this self-scripted morality play, the rake of Newport attacks sex on television while mounting a new soap opera on his own superstation; the purveyor of 24-hour news debunks "gloom and doom" on the networks and insists on television programing's showing only "the kind of people you'd like your kids to grow up and be like."

To probe the inner workings of the new Turner,Playboy's obvious choice as interviewer was Contributing Editor Peter Ross Range, who conducted our first interview with him in 1978. The man Range found this time was, indeed, different, and here is his report:

"Turner has changed. He is no longer the laugh-a-minute, expository motor mouth who sees a classic metaphor behind every man's maneuvers. Yet he still often portrays his own zigs and zags through the corporate jungles in David and Goliath terms. He still relishes the role of underdog yet views his competitors not merely as bigger but as part of a dark conspiracy to do in Turner, his company and, for that matter, the whole of American civilization.

"He has also become, as many men in high position do, at least a partial victim of his own celebrity. When we first invited him to do the 'Playboy Interview,' while walking along the Newport waterfront in 1977, his response was. 'Wow!Playboy! That's the big time!' Our interview was his first major national exposure outside sports publications, and he was duly impressed. Since then, he has appeared in virtually every medium and takes himself a great deal more seriously than before, especially since he appeared on the cover of Time and as the subject of a British Broadcasting Company television special called 'The Man from Atlanta' (which he unabashedly aired last spring on his own satellite network). Consequently, he agreed to the second 'Playboy Interview' only after a melodramatic groan and many months of abrupt cancellations and wasted trips.

"Even when he is at his least cooperative, tracking Turner remains a special kind of adventure--a high-speed chase over the real and figurative landscape of his life in cars, jeeps and airplanes and on foot. The chief difference between this year's conversation and the one five years ago was that we did no talking on a sailboat--but we did a lot on the hoof, trekking briskly around his 5000-acre plantation in the South Carolina low country, near Charleston. He lives there with his family on weekends between sorties into the national wars in Washington and elsewhere.

"Turner invited me to begin the interview with a visit to his plantation. We flew in from different cities to the Charleston airport on Friday night and began our conversation during the 35-mile drive to his house."

[Q] Playboy: When we interviewed you five years ago, you were known mainly as the colorful sailor who had won the America's Cup yacht race and as the owner of the worst team in baseball. Now the Atlanta Braves are winners, you're a force in national television and you've even been on the cover of Time. Quite a change.

[A] Turner: You know what you're finding now? You're finding that I've really made it. Much as you begrudgingly hate to admit it, you're really impressed, aren't you?

[Q] Playboy: Yes, but----

[A] Turner: You bet your sweet ass you are. I've made it now and I've made it in television. We just finished a survey that showed unequivocally and undeniably, by a massive margin, that more than half the people who are even aware of cable television and have it in their homes choose Cable News Network as their source of news. I mean, ABC and NBC and CBS combined did not get as many votes as CNN. We've taken over news leadership from the networks. They had 30 years to do it and we did it in only two and a half.

[Q] Playboy: Can you really justify that claim? After all, most homes still don't have cable.

[A] Turner: Yes, I can. We're putting it in ads and on our posters in the airports. Cable is now in nearly 40 percent of the homes and we're in 75 percent of those. So we're into 31 percent of the homes in America, and all those people also get the networks. And those are the people who responded to our poll. I'll show you the figures. They're simple--ten pages double-spaced. Even you can understand them.

[Q] Playboy: There has been a lot of talk lately of your merging with a major network or studio. What about the rumored Mgm deal?

[A] Turner: [Pause] Shut the machine off!

[Off-the-record discussion, then interview resumes.]

[Q] Playboy: There is no question that your news network and your Wtbs "superstation" have made a big mark on American television. But you've spent a lot of time lobbying in Washington against increased rates for movies carried on wtbs. How have those rates affected you?

[A] Turner: We've lost about 300,000 subscribers, which isn't too bad, out of the 25,000,000 we signed up. We expected it to be much worse, but people are sticking with me. But this whole thing is too complicated for Playboy. It's complicated, complicated, complicated! I mean, it'll all be changed again by the time this interview appears in five months. Playboy operates on a five-month delay! Sixty Minutes operates on a two-month delay! Cable News Network operates on no delay, not even a ten-second delay! Playboy is just sleaze on some pages and outdated information on the others.

[Q] Playboy: Each to his own opinion.

[A] Turner: Well, it's the truth. You can put that in there. It'll be edited out.

[Q] Playboy: Let's wait and see.

[A] Turner: You've got crotch shots of attractive women on one page and then you talk about your editorial integrity by having a six-month-old interview on another. Why don't you get the magazine out faster?

[Q] Playboy: There's actually about a three-month lead time, and it has to do with quality control of the color pictures----

[A] Turner: Why? I mean, the dirty pictures can be shot six months ahead. Pussies look the same whether or not they are six months old. In fact, they could have been shot 60 years ago, if there had been color film. For someone who's running as fast as me, this interview will be totally obsolete when it appears.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe you'll be surprised--our interviews tend to last. Anyway, haven't you been claiming that you've changed into a more serious person from the hell raiser you once were?

[A] Turner: I have changed. I've gotten more serious, more concerned about the trends of the world--the overpopulation problem, the environment, the nuclear issue. Love Canal, unemployment, inflation.

[Q] Playboy: What do you do about them on your stations?

[A] Turner: We do documentaries about them. We just finished a major series on the auto industry.

[Q] Playboy: Other media have done that.

[A] Turner: Nobody's done one on soil erosion, and we got a big award for it. No one's done our documentary on population control. We got a UN award for that. Nobody had ever done a documentary on the Boy Scouts until we did one. In 30 years, the networks have never done a program on the Boy Scouts. I thought that was a devastating bit of information! That's the sort of programing I want--shows that are uplifting, that support family values.

[Q] Playboy: Five years ago, you told Playboy that you only skimmed the front page of the newspaper, then went straight to the sports and business sections. You said you didn't want anything to do with all that bad news on the front pages.

[A] Turner: I still don't read the news.

[Q] Playboy: What about TV?

[A] Turner: I never watch television news.

[Q] Playboy: Including Cable News Network?

[A] Turner: No, I watch CNN all the time. But at CNN, it's balanced. CNN spends only about half the time on disasters, the other half on interviews, sports news, business, editorials, tips. ...

[Q] Playboy: But your reporters cover disasters, too. You said a few years ago, "What do you want, how many children got killed in a school-bus accident in Chile?"

[A] Turner: Well, that's true. I still don't think they ought to gleefully rub their palms and say, "Ha, ha, school bus overturned in Chile. And we can show the little crushed bodies of the children." I still don't agree with that. We do it, but at least we present what's never been on television before--responsible news.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Turner: I mean, the way the networks covered the Vietnam war just sickened me. It was anti-American. They never showed the American boys getting medals or helping villagers or anything. I didn't watch too much of it, but I know the military and our leaders were very unhappy about the way the war was covered.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that the opinions of Government leaders should determine how the media cover news?

[A] Turner: I think it should be balanced.

[Q] Playboy: You mean, for every flaming car on the streets of Beirut----

[A] Turner: There could be an interview with Philip Habib on how we could bring peace to Lebanon. That would be balance.

[Q] Playboy: The networks do that.

[A] Turner: No, they don't. They don't run a fraction of the interviews we do. They have Face the Nation and Meet the Press--one half hour a week. We have 25, 30, 50 hours of that type of programing. We spend one hour, from ten to 11 every night, on The Freeman Report. That's five hours a week right there. You put out a magazine only once a month.

[A] You know, I was really pissed off about my first Playboy Interview when it came out. You lied to me; you said you were not going to run anything like that.

[Q] Playboy: Like what?

[A] Turner: We were going to leave women out of it. You know, I bared my soul. I gave you everything I had and only asked that you didn't take any cheap shots.

[Q] Playboy: What cheap shots? At the time, you had recently created a scandal with your behavior in Newport during the 1977 America's Cup race. We merely asked you to comment on press reports saying you had a reputation as a womanizer. You replied that you were a family man, then volunteered that you photographed nude women, and we went on to other topics.

[A] Turner: Well, we were going to leave dirty language and women out of it, because everybody does it--99 percent or 88 or whatever. Do you know how many times I've been interviewed since then? About 10,000! I'm not really pissed, because I agreed to do the interview again, but hopefully you'll be a little more intelligent in your editing this time. But if you ever do anything like that again, you'll never see me again; and it'll be your loss, because five years from now, you're going to want to come back again--if I'm not dead. I've just reached the point where I'm really going to be able to do some really constructive stuff.

[Q] Playboy: It's not our job to sanitize your remarks, but let's go on: What do you mean by "really constructive stuff"?

[A] Turner: Well, we're already underwriting Jacques Cousteau's program. I spent a week with him on the Amazon and took my sons along. I gave him $4,000,000 for his work this year. We'll get four hours of programing out of it. Of course, I'm losing my shirt on it. That's double the budget of network programs. But at least I'm going to keep Cousteau operating. He's on my team.

[Q] Playboy: Nature seems to be one of your passions. Is your plantation part of that?

[A] Turner: It's a zoo. We'll be there in a few minutes. I've got 5000 acres of land that used to be five plantations. At the outbreak of the Civil War, there were 500 slaves living here and probably about 100 other people. Now there arc more animals than people. We've got deer, duck, doves, geese, bison. I even have a cougar named Kenya. He took a swipe at me one day when I went into his cage. I've got two bears, too, except that one of them got away. Boo Boo's gone.

[Q] Playboy: Boo Boo?

[A] Turner: Boo Boo's the bear. She's out roaming around the woods now. [Boo Boo was later found and returned.] There's the house--Hope Plantation.

[Q] Playboy: It's a beautiful place. How did you get it?

[A] Turner: Bought it from Yankees.

[Q] Playboy: How much did you pay for it?

[A] Turner: None of your damn business.

[The following morning, after breakfast, the interview resumed as the family and some house guests gathered before the television set in the spacious but comfortable living room decorated with duck decoys and a tasseled overhead wooden fan. It was time for the CNN feed from Atlanta that Turner receives on the 15-foot satellite-receiving dish set up in his back yard. The program was about a Milan fashion house that was showing models in very revealing new designs.]

[A] Turner: Look at those models! This is like watching those old Movietone newsreels; they'd always have a report on the latest fashions from Paris.

[During a break on Turner's station, there was a reference made to Henry VIII.]

[A] Turner: Henry VIII. ... He didn't get divorced, he just had their heads chopped off when he got tired of them. That's a good way to get rid of a woman--no alimony!

[The fashion show resumed on CNN and a pair of models displayed see-through blouses. A voice in Turner's living room remarked jocularly, "Blue television!"]

[Q] Playboy: Family stuff, eh, Ted?

[A] Turner: Woo, woo! You know, it used to be that a woman wouldn't even show her legs at the beach. But once you've seen a whole bunch of tits, they all look the same--no different from cows' udders.

[Turner's wife, Janie, admonished him, "This is going to be in the interview, Ted! Ted, be quiet! Just be quiet!"]

[A] Turner: What's the big deal? They're no different from cows' udders--mammary glands. Men have them, just more rudimentary. ... You know, I like those dresses. Low-cut. Short on the top and the bottom. I like to see a lot of the woman, even if she's a skinny, way-out woman, like those fashion models. I like the Playboy women better.

[Turner then led Range on a long walking tour of Hope. Plantation, answering questions while pointing out flocks of doves, snipe and other wild fowl.]

[Q] Playboy: What gave you the idea for a 24-hour news network?

[A] Turner: I actually had the idea before I started the superstation on satellite in 1976. I was thinking ahead, and at that time, Home Box Office was already on the Satcom satellite with older programs and sports. We had old movies and sports on wtbs, and I thought, Well, what's the next channel? We already had plenty of sports and movies, so it seemed like news would be the next most logical thing to provide. But I knew it was going to be very expensive. And I never thought we'd be the one to do it, because we were a very small company and the superstation hadn't proved itself yet.

[Q] Playboy: So why did you do it?

[A] Turner: Well, Time, Inc., which owns Home Box Office, started sneaking around a little and found out that the major networks' news budgets for only 60 hours a month were considerably more than $100,000,000 a year. Time figured it would cost at least as much to start a news network as it cost the networks. So I went up and talked with Time's people and said, "If you guys want to do it, I'm not going to. But if you don't want it. ..." They said, "Go ahead. We're not going to do it. We're in business to make money." So even though I couldn't get the commitments up front that I needed within the cable industry, I went ahead and launched CNN in June 1980.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you think there was a market?

[A] Turner: Because news has always been just a stepchild of the networks. The big money is in entertainment. There has never before been a first-class, in-depth news service on television.

[Q] Playboy: You don't consider the major networks first-class?

[A] Turner: They just bring you 22 minutes of gloom-and-doom headlines. Say the Pope gets shot. The networks all lead with the same story; they all run the news at the same time at the same length. The only difference is they're trying to get the ratings. And they'll do anything they can for that. The guy who heads up ABC News isn't even a newsman, he's a sports man. It's just showbiz. It's a personality contest. They build up their anchors with wise-seeming persons who get everyone's confidence and give people advice--I think it's just a bunch of bullshit.

[Q] Playboy: Would you say that about someone like Walter Cronkite?

[A] Turner: Sure. I've said it dozens of times. I have never talked to Cronkite, but he kind of agrees. He always said the half-hour evening newscast was nothing more than the headlines.

[Q] Playboy: What's wrong with that?

[A] Turner: It's become a ratings battle, and the networks have taken the yellow-journalistic route. You know, cover the spectacular, visual stories, like a hotel fire or a volcanic eruption, a major minder, the airline crash of the day. ...

[Q] Playboy: That's yellow journalism? An airline crash or the eruption of Mount St. Helens is yellow journalism?

[A] Turner: In those 22 minutes, they don't have any time for incisive reporting. They don't cover business virtually at all. They just say, "The stock market is up." Business is not a big ratings grabber, but that's the kind of stuff we do. We cover everything. We're like a newspaper of the air: We have news and editorials and a style section and in-depth sports coverage. The networks don't do that.

[Q] Playboy: No sports coverage? What do the networks do all Saturday and Sunday afternoons?

[A] Turner: I'm talking about sports news. Normally, they give the scores, but nobody ever had a half-hour news program just about sports until CNN.

[Q] Playboy: You're making cable news sound like Turner's gift to mankind. Except for the packaging, how is the news product your network delivers different from that of the networks?

[A] Turner: What's changed about magazine interviews except that you use a tape recorder instead of a pencil and a pad?

[Q] Playboy: At least we don't go around claiming to have invented the wheel.

[A] Turner: Well, I'm not claiming that we've invented the wheel----

[Q] Playboy: Close. When CNN went on the air, you called it "the greatest achievement in the annals of journalism."

[A] Turner: I really believe that. In the history of journalism, journalism has tried to accomplish two things: one, to report the news; two, to report it quickly. The newspaper that got out on the street first with the story was ahead. In television, we beat the networks all the time, because they won't interrupt their regularly scheduled programing when there's a bulletin--unless it's a Presidential-assassination attempt or something like that. We're reporting the news as it happens, and that has never happened before in the history of the world on television. Never before. And you can't get the news faster than when it's happening. Time magazine runs on a one-week delay and Playboy runs on a six-month delay.

[Q] Playboy: Wait a minute--on the really big stuff, the networks will always interrupt programing. On the Reagan-assassination attempt, you were not the first one on the air with the story.

[A] Turner: That's because our cameras were inside the hotel, carrying his speech to the United Auto Workers--live. ABC's cameras were outside, waiting to see if anybody would shoot him. So we carried his speech and they got his being shot because all they wanted for their newscast was him waving to the crowd as he walked out.

We cover the substance and all the other networks want is the sensational. While we carry his speech, they're running soap operas or Charlie's Angels.

[Q] Playboy: The traditional network view would be that you've got it all wrong: You're in there covering a speech that maybe 12 people in the entire country care about while their reporters are sitting outside waiting for the one story that, if it happens, everybody will care about.

[A] Turner: Do you know what you just said? You just said that only 12 people care about what the President says. That's a sad, sad commentary.

[Q] Playboy: What if you have no interest in that speech at that moment? We're busy in the middle of the day, and so are you.

[A] Turner: If I'd had the time and had the choice between two game shows and a soap opera and the President speaking to the U.A.W., I'd have watched the President speaking to the U.A.W.

[Q] Playboy: That's very high-sounding, considering that when you do get a hot story, you save it for your prime-time evening news show, just as the networks do. James Alan Miklaszewski's exclusive report on American advisors' carrying rifles in El Salvador was the biggest news scoop CNN has had so far. But it was held in secrecy for prime time, then was put on the air--pardon, on the cable--with great fanfare.

[A] Turner: When you're out in the field in a foreign country, you don't always have access to an earth station [for satellite transmission] to get the story back. In a place like El Salvador, usually ABC and CBS and NBC are there and have their regular time scheduled on the satellite. But we might ... that story didn't have to be broken in the middle of the day.

[Q] Playboy: So you're doing essentially the same thing that's always been done.

[A] Turner: We're trying to make it as interesting and as exciting as we can.

[Q] Playboy: So is Van Gordon Sauter, the head of CBS News.

[A] Turner: That's true, but we've got a much bigger canvas to paint on than Sauter does. He's painting on a little page and we've got the whole wall to paint on.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that the networks' coverage of Vietnam was anti-American. Do you think Miklaszewski's report was anti-American?

[A] Turner: No. ...

[Q] Playboy: Well, it amounted to the same thing--reporting news our Government might not like. What's the difference?

[A] Turner: Balance. All you've got to do is ask Norman Lear. Ask anybody.

[Q] Playboy: Norman Lear, the producer? What does he have to do with it?

[A] Turner: Norman Lear likes CNN. He told me so. He's a pretty good man as far as judging the quality and fairness of TV.

[Q] Playboy: That's not what we were discussing. Lear never complained that the networks were anti-American in their Vietnam-war coverage.

[A] Turner: Well, anyway, the American people support me. CNN is good for the American people.

[Q] Playboy: Around the networks, they claim you bootleg satellite news footage.

[A] Turner: Oh, that's done all the time by everybody. The networks use our stuff, too. I think we have permission from ABC and NBC, and they have permission to use our stuff.

[Q] Playboy: In one case--an exclusive ABC interview with Lebanese president Amin Gemayel--it was said that you used ABC's footage in promos for your own Prime News.

[A] Turner: That's possible.

[Q] Playboy: In another case, ABC sent you a telegram and said, "Cut this out."

[A] Turner: All right, that's possible, too.

[Q] Playboy: So you didn't have permission.

[A] Turner: When you're on 24 hours a day live, you're going to. ... You know, we have made some mistakes.

[Turner, who was suffering from a cold, became irritated with the questioning at this point and cut off the interview. It was agreed that he and Range would meet again the following week in Atlanta and would fly together to Washington to continue the interview on the airplane.

[When Range met him at the Atlanta airport, Turner was in a foul mood. "I'm not going to be interviewed tonight," he said. "Be smart--don't be a dummy. I'm not going to answer a whole bunch of technical questions. In many ways, I don't know how the company works. I watch it; I like it. But if you're just going to ask a whole bunch of negative questions, forget it. Go to ABC. I won't do the interview."

[During the flight to Washington, 'Turner's mood fluctuated radically from friendliness to sudden hostility. He described as a kind of living hell his constant lobbying in Washington to fend off those who would make life harder for a cable programer. He seemed a driven, ravaged man, and yet a man who continually sought more of the same punishment. In the bad moments, he attacked the interviewer and rejected the interview: "I've been on the cover of Time. I don't need your sleazy magazine." At other moments, he became the voluble, charming and self-infatuated Turner of his public image. At the end of the flight, Turner had again mellowed, and after much friendly conversation that remained off the record, it was agreed that the interview would be resumed several weeks later.

[There were two trips and several abrupt cancellations before the interview was resumed. Turner finally invited Range to accompany him to Las Vegas and talk on the plane. Turner arrived at the Atlanta airport with his close friend and frequent traveling companion Liz Wickersham, the pretty hostess of the wtbs show "The Lighter Side." The airline upgraded all three of their tickets to first-class, a courtesy Turner is often given. The interview picked up as the flight left Atlanta.]

[Q] Playboy: You caused a flurry in the television world last winter when you went to New York with the idea of merging your company, Turner Broadcasting System, with one of the major networks. We thought you kept that kind of talk secret.

[A] Turner: That's one of the problems. I haven't started wearing disguises yet. I ought to wear a kind of Humphrey Bogart disguise--a trench coat with the collar turned up. Like Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther. I'd wear a hat pulled down and dark glasses. I'd grow a beard and shave off my mustache. I'd wear a stocking cap over my head and a sweater. And sneakers. And gloves.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have serious talks?

[A] Turner: In the case of two of the networks, we were turned down. They just said they figured out that I would be the largest shareholder in the company, and that was all they needed to know.

[Q] Playboy: Turner Broadcasting System is worth only $200,000,000 to $300,000,000. How could you become the largest shareholder in a merger with a company ten times that size?

[A] Turner: Because I own 87 percent of my company. Bill Paley [recently retired chairman of CBS] owns only about six percent of CBS' stock, I think.

[Q] Playboy: But you still wouldn't have the almost total control you now enjoy with your own company. Why do you want to merge with a network?

[A] Turner: Because starting a really viable fourth network is a lot harder. The networks have those owned-and-operated stations in the biggest markets: New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. They reach one fourth of the American market right there. That's why we're also talking with Metromedia--it owns stations in the major markets. You've got to have money to stay in business.

[Q] Playboy: But isn't taking over one of the major national networks a big leap for your company?

[A] Turner: No. First of all, I'm already in the cable-network business. I have three cable networks, one radio network and two television stations. In number of hours, I think we're already the largest syndicator of television programing in the United States. The figure is kicked up there by the overnight coverage in many places. But we can still reach only 31 percent of the homes in the country. We're in the land of the giants. I'm just like a little mouse running around under a bunch of elephants, trying to be sure they don't step on me.

[Q] Playboy: Would it be healthy to have the largest cable network in combination with one of the largest broadcast networks?

[A] Turner: That's what you've got now. ABC is in combination with Westinghouse to compete with us with the Satellite News Channel. Their combination with Entertainment & Sports Programing Network is against us in sports. espn started as an independent company. But then it began losing a lot of money, even though it was owned by Getty Oil, which is a multibillion-dollar company. So ABC took a 49 percent option and committed millions and millions to it.

[Q] Playboy: What's wrong with that?

[A] Turner: That's how the networks really hurt us. When the United States Football League got started, it needed a major network contract. ABC said, "OK, we'll carry your games." We called the U.S.F.L. and said we'd like to bid, too. But it turned out that ABC had made it a condition of their carrying the games that if the U.S.F.L. were going to do any cable games, they had to be on espn, not on Turner's network. By using its cable network, ABC made a deal with espn for cable rights. We were frozen out. We weren't even allowed a meaningful bid. I'd like to have the ability to do that same sort of thing.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back for a moment to CBS and Paley, in an interview with Broadcasting magazine last year, you called Paley "a failure." You said CBS was "a cheap whorehouse" that had been "taken over by the sleaze artists." If you believe that, why would you want to merge with such a network?

[A] Turner: If I was part of CBS, with billions of dollars behind me, then I would have size. I would be able to meet the others in the field with equal resources. I could fight a pitched battle with them. Right now, I can't. It would be like getting supplies and getting reinforcements. I would like to come down out of the hills and meet them on the battlefields.

[Q] Playboy: But why did you call Paley, who built that billion-dollar empire, a failure?

[A] Turner: I have to admit ... it was easy to say that, never having met him, because he really is up in years now.

[Q] Playboy: Do you honestly feel that CBS is a cheap whorehouse?

[A] Turner: I'm a human being, just like everybody else. I'm up some days and down others. Some days, I just refuse comment. If I'm feeling a little down, I won't say anything. But if I'm really up, I'll let it all hang out. I do have a slight propensity to put my foot in my mouth.

[A] But those are extremely strong, strong words. You know, several years ago, I said that the network presidents were guilty of treason and all should be lined up and shot after a court-martial.

[Q] Playboy: Fairly strong stuff.

[A] Turner: Is that strong, huh? I said it before 7000 members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and they gave me a standing ovation. I said the worst enemies that the United States ever faced were not the Nazis and the Japanese in World War Two but were living among us today and running the three networks.

[Q] Playboy: Do you really believe that?

[A] Turner: Well, when Paley was read those comments and was asked what he thought about Turner, he was very gracious and said I had done a good job. But he did not (continued on page 154)Ted Turner(continued from page 68) deny the charges. Why not?"

[Q] Playboy: Do charges like that need denying? And what did you mean when you called CBS a cheap whorehouse?

[A] Turner: I meant its sleazy programs, putting too much sensationalism in the news to win the ratings race. If you take a stop watch and time the negative stones in the evening newscasts, you will find that on the average night, about 70 to 80 percent of it is volcanoes, people being flooded out of their homes, Marines shooting people in Lebanon, Congressional wrongdoing, lawsuits, murders, hijacking, plane crashes and that sort of thing. Barry Goldwater timed it and he said he got 85 percent; I get about 70 percent. It's like the front page of the newspaper. But unlike the newspaper that has second, third and fourth sections--the way we do on Cable News--that's all there is to the evening news. There's no time for anything else. And in prime time, there are no choices on the networks. Only stupidity, sex and violence.

Television in this country has run amuck. It's one thing to have concentration in the entertainment business, but news has got a special status, particularly since in the United States, unlike most countries in the world, television is not controlled by the Government. The Government can at least ensure that there's some responsibility, that television can't run amuck to the detriment of the society. And that's what we have here.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds a bit like the editorial you taped personally last year for CNN denouncing the film Taxi Driver. That was in reaction to the verdict in the case of John Hinckley, the young man who shot President Reagan. Are you suggesting legislation regulating the content of movies and the content of television programs?

[A] Turner: I didn't say that. I didn't say that.

[Q] Playboy: You said, "The people who produced this movie should be just as much on trial as John Hinckley himself." And you advised viewers to write to their Congressmen.

[A] Turner: All that does is put pressure on people. I don't think legislation should be necessary. I think self-regulation is the best kind of regulation.

[Q] Playboy: What about the free market place as a regulator?

[A] Turner: I think that those who are producing programs should exercise reasonable responsibility.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't one man's reasonable responsibility another man's censorship?

[A] Turner:Taxi Driver went beyond the bounds of reasonable responsibility, in my opinion. And in the opinion of the people who made it. Nobody was proud of it.

[Q] Playboy: In his CNN commentary the next day, your own chief correspondent, Daniel Schorr, agreed with you about violence but disagreed about pressuring Congress. He said your approach might violate freedom of the press as defined by the First Amendment. How did you feel about that?

[A] Turner: I thought it was great. That just proves what a loose, terrific company we have when somebody can take issue with the boss on the air. I think it's great.

[Q] Playboy: Your editorial was shown ten or 11 times. Schorr's rebuttal was taken off the air before it could run the customary second or third time for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained. Did you have something to do with that?

[A] Turner: I didn't know anything about it. I didn't even know he had done it. I just felt the inclination to tape my opinion one weekend in South Carolina. When I got back to Atlanta on Monday, Dan's had run and had been lifted. The producer or whoever was running the station didn't think it ought to run again. Somebody else made that decision. We have nearly 2000 employees now, and they are all running around doing their own thing. Hugh Hefner doesn't know what you're doing-tonight, does he?

[Q] Playboy: No, but the editors do.

[A] Turner: Well, it's Hefner's baby. Anyway, the whole thing at CNN is to allow people to take issue with one another.

[Q] Playboy: But you feel strongly about sex and violence on television, don't you?

[A] Turner: So does Dan Schorr. But you don't have to agree with me about everything to work for me.

[Q] Playboy: What do you feel should finally be done about the things you don't like in movies and on television?

[A] Turner: Call attention to it and maybe it won't be done again. I am unaware of any movie like Taxi Driver that's been filmed since I broadcast my editorial.

[Q] Playboy: So you think you've become a moral force for movies, too? And if calling attention to it doesn't work, do you believe a way should be found to make that kind of movie illegal?

[A] Turner: Only as a last resort.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to your comment about the networks' running Charlie's Angels during prime time while you run the news: You seem to have a real dislike for that kind of show, don't you?

[A] Turner: Yeah. That and The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas. The networks are poisoning our nation with shows like that. And they are poisoning the whole world against us. Those sleazy programs are distributed all over the world. The three networks are failures. We're approaching the 21st Century with the most powerful communications force the world has ever seen. And it's being totally misused by three organizations that couldn't care less about what happens to the nation. It's insane.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do about it?

[A] Turner: I'd like to get my hands on a network. I'd like to be the big guy for a while.

[Q] Playboy: And what would you do with it--fire the chairman and everybody in programing?

[A] Turner: No. I wouldn't even have to run the place. I'd run my division and someone else could be in charge. But I would try to make the entertainment programing more uplifting.

[Q] Playboy: What does that mean?

[A] Turner: I'd try to slowly change the characters on those shows toward the kind of people that you'd like your children to grow up and be like. Listen, I know a station manager in Atlanta who told me privately that his own children were forbidden to watch his station. And in my merger discussions with the networks, one of the top officials said to me, "Ted, you criticize us for being immoral people, but if you knew us, you'd know that many of us are very moral in our private lives. We may have some programs on that aren't good, but we're very nice family people."

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction to that?

[A] Turner: I said, "Well, you know, that won't wash as far as I'm concerned. That's exactly what the Gestapo and the people who ran the death camps said. When they went home after gassing people, they were very nice to their children and their dogs and their neighbors. But you're in a position of responsibility. That doesn't wash your hands."

[A] The networks need a truly competitive force that is being run by someone who cares more about the country than about the profits. I subscribe to the Rotary motto: "He profits most who serves the best."

[Q] Playboy: How does that apply?

[A] Turner: In my company, I've accepted short-term losses for long-term gains. The networks have been sacrificing long-term gains for short-term profits. If our country goes down the drain, the networks go with it. And if the network executives are blamed, they will be burned at the stake for being responsible. Like in the French Revolution.

[Q] Playboy: That brings us again to the question of whether or not you practice what you preach. Are you claiming you don't care about making money?

[A] Turner: I'm not motivated to make money.

[Q] Playboy: In a speech at Georgetown University last year, you said, "It almost makes me ill that [some] people are making $500,000 a year." Aren't you making that much?

[A] Turner: You're taking that out of context! I said that money shouldn't be your primary motivation in life. I'm talking about materialism.

[Q] Playboy: But you're not exactly hurting, right? A plantation, two islands----

[A] Turner: I need to make the money so I can do the programing. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself. Every nickel I can get my hands on, every time we get reinforcements, they're being thrown right into the front line of the battle. All my property is being used for ecological purposes, too.

[Q] Playboy: But you're not giving your salary away, are you?

[A] Turner: I give away a tremendous amount. I contribute to a number of charities. I make tremendous amounts of political donations. I fly tourist on airplanes. I cut my own hair. I live without air conditioning in my homes. I drive a small car----

[Q] Playboy: Wait a minute. That's your old PR. You drive one of the biggest, most expensive cars made in Japan. The company advertises on your network and it gave you the car----

[A] Turner: That's right. But I used to drive a small one. They are a big advertiser, so they wanted to give me a bigger one.

[Q] Playboy: And you haven't flown tourist class since we've been with you----

[A] Turner: I pay coach.

[Q] Playboy: But somehow you're upgraded to first class?

[A] Turner: If you get something for nothing, it's pretty hard to turn it down.

[Q] Playboy: In that Georgetown speech, you mentioned that when you appeared on the cover of Success magazine, you held it up heavenward and said, "Well, Dad----"

[A] Turner: "Is this enough?" What I was saying to those kids was that I now feel that I'm enough of a success that it no longer has to be the prime motivation in my life to prove myself to my father.

[Q] Playboy: Your father committed suicide when you were 24 years old. How did that influence the course of your life?

[A] Turner: My father grew up in a different world--the depths of the Depression. He had watched his father go from being a farmer who owned his own land to losing it all and living the rest of his life as a sharecropper. So my father had a desperate, burning desire to be a success. In that time, America was more of a rugged, individualistic country. And my father was primarily interested in himself and in how much money he was going to make. But in retrospect, I think that was one of the things that led eventually to his committing suicide. Because when he made the $1,000,000 that he said he was going to make, he told me that it was hollow. It did not give him the satisfaction that he had thought it would. And that's true of anybody who makes making money his primary objective in life. It should not be your main goal if you want to be happy and successful. How can you be successful if you're not happy?

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be happiest when you're fighting battles. Do you glory in being the underdog?

[A] Turner: I am the underdog, so I may as well enjoy it.

[Q] Playboy: Yet, instead of enjoying it, you constantly complain about network discrimination against you.

[A] Turner: We are discriminated against! They beat on us all the time. The networks are a cartel. They collude. Unofficially. You know how? They just agree. Why doesn't ABC try to get the Super Bowl every year? Why are they content to let NBC get it one year and CBS the next and just move it around? The reason is that nobody wants to make the commitment to bid the price up enough to get the whole thing, because they'd all rather share it and keep the three-way old-boy system working. That's why they all started their morning news at seven o'clock until we forced them into the early-morning segment. They didn't want to escalate the battle, because in the past, they had limited competition. There were these unspoken rules, which they all agreed to play by. And in the market, they all raise their rates the same amount every year.

[Q] Playboy: If they were colluding, wouldn't the Federal Communications Commission have something to say about that? They're the ones pushing deregulation.

[A] Turner: Yeah, Mark Fowler, the FCC commissioner, wants to dereg me right out of business. He was a very strong attorney for the over-the-air broadcasters before he was hired by the FCC. He was in the pocket of the broadcasters.

[Q] Playboy: By broadcasters, you mean the over-the-air industry as opposed to the cable-television industry. Are the broadcasters your main adversaries?

[A] Turner: Listen to this: The new president of the National Association of Broadcasters, Eddy Fritz, told my chief lobbyist in Washington, in so many words, "I've been instructed to oppose anything that will help you here in Washington." And then he also said--this is one that he's going to deny, I'm sure--"If there is some way Turner could promise to stop criticizing the networks and the affiliated stations that are running network programing, we could drop our opposition to him in Washington on some other issues."

[Q] Playboy: What did you reply?

[A] Turner:"Hell, no!"

[Q] Playboy: You told him that?

[A] Turner: No. I just didn't send a signal back or ask for a meeting. I'd rather have my heart buried at Wounded Knee.

[Q] Playboy: As usual, you make it sound like war.

[A] Turner: It is like fighting during wartime. There are people being killed all around you. Actually, Fritz is a super guy. In fact, Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, which fought us on a number of things, is a super guy. But they're both just hired guns, highly paid lobbyists representing a vast, multibillion-dollar industry. Valenti has a posh reception hall and a huge screening room where he's always taking Congressmen for cocktails and the latest movies. But me, I own most of my own company. I'm up there lobbying for survival, whereas they're lobbying for their salaries.

[Q] Playboy: There's a lot of talk that you'd really like to be in the movie business and become another Darryl F. Zanuck. True?

[A] Turner: I don't even know what a movie studio is supposed to be like. I've never really gotten a tour of a studio.

[Q] Playboy: Then what were you doing last fall walking around the mgm lot in Los Angeles? You were so upset when we alluded to that, you went off the record.

[A] Turner: How did you know about that?

[Q] Playboy: Reporters have ears and telephones. It just hasn't been reported before.

[A] Turner: Well, I have to admit, there was some whispering in the hallways. I heard the custodian who was sweeping the place whisper to the receptionist, "Turner's out here to buy mgm."

[Q] Playboy: Were you?

[A] Turner: I wasn't there to buy mgm. I'm just a very colorful customer who buys a lot of product from the motion-picture industry. I had discussions with mgm about areas of mutual interest.

[Q] Playboy: All right, then, is your next dream to get into the movie business?

[A] Turner: I just don't think the movie business and I should be fighting any longer. I think the major battles are over. I have criticized the studio executives for some horrible movies that they've made. And some of them have privately admitted that they're ashamed of movies like The Warriors, too. But I've also congratulated them for productions like The Winds of War, Gandhi and E.T.

[Q] Playboy: What about producing your own?

[A] Turner: We're already producing a mystery film for our network. The working title is The Q Factor. But I would love to have been responsible for the movie Gandhi and the movie E.T. I thought Gandhi was terrific. I cried during that movie. It's in the top ten movies of all time in my book. It's up there with Gone with the Wind. You know what is so great about Gandhi? It's socially constructive. Gandhi shows that you can win through nonviolent operation. It shows you can accomplish what you want if you're patient and friendly with the people you beat when you're through. And that's exactly what I'm trying to do with the networks. I'm trying to intimidate them and make them want to leave--like Gandhi made the British want to leave India. But stay friends when it's all over.

[Q] Playboy: Who's the Lord Mountbatten in this scenario? Someone like Paley?

[A] Turner: Who's Mountbatten? I mean, I know who he was. ...

[Q] Playboy: We mean in the sense that, as viceroy of India, he was the one who finally saw the wisdom of Gandhi's ways.

[A] Turner: He was in India at the time?

[Q] Playboy: Yes. It was he who negotiated the British withdrawal. Who would play that role in your television wars?

[A] Turner: I seriously doubt that it would be Paley. It may not happen in his lifetime. But, you know, in the last merger negotiations, I didn't meet Paley. I'd like to.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned The Winds of War. Would you like to have had that on your network?

[A] Turner: Sure, but it cost $40,000,000, dummy. We cannot afford such high-budget things. That's why I'm trying to get a network!

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the miniseries is the wave of the TV future in entertainment?

[A] Turner: I think it's going to hasten the demise of the networks. They're committing suicide in a way with programs such as The Winds of War.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Turner: By disrupting the viewing habits toward their staple, which is the weekly series, the continuing series, such as I Love Lucy or Dallas, that people watch every week religiously. Just like people watch soaps every day or used to watch Cronkite. Once they break the weekly-series habit, then they're free. And if the networks aren't running a Winds of War, it's over. If I have a baseball game on or a good older movie, the viewers come to me.

[Q] Playboy: That reminds us: You're in a unique position as an owner in both professional baseball and television. As the owner of the Atlanta Braves, you also own their broadcast rights, and you own the satellite network that distributes those games to people all over the country who live nowhere near Atlanta. For starters, how did you come up with the notion of calling the Braves America's Team?

[A] Turner: The name was being fed back to us from people who lived in places like Idaho and Alaska, who didn't have hometown teams. But I never would have adopted it if the team hadn't started doing well. It's pretty hard to call an also-ran America's Team. I wouldn't want to drag America's good name through the mud.

[Q] Playboy: What has been the secret of your team's surprising success?

[A] Turner: Good management. When I bought the Braves in 1976, they were one of the worst organizations in baseball, one of the lowest-budget operations. The people who owned it were nice guys, but none of them was dedicated to winning and they didn't spend anything like what the competition did, starting right at the bottom, with scouting. That was the first thing the guys running the team told me when I took over. So we tripled the number of scouts. Then they said the next thing we needed was good instructors in the minor leagues, so we got them. Then they said we needed more budget to sign the top draft picks, so we did that.

[Q] Playboy: Did it work?

[A] Turner: Well, we finished in the cellar for the next four years, setting an all-time record for most consecutive last-place finishers in interdivisional play. Then we bounced up to fourth place and, last year, to first. Basically, we built a whole new ball club from our own organization. There are only three players on our roster today who were there seven years ago.

[Q] Playboy: Not bad for a guy who knew nothing about baseball.

[A] Turner: I can do virtually anything that requires good management, intelligence, planning and hard work. I run the team the same way I ran my sailboat. If I had the time, I could definitely manage a baseball team.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like your one-day foray into a uniform five years ago, which baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn quickly stopped. How can you say that a guy who had never played the game seriously could be an expert?

[A] Turner: First of all, I've watched more than 1000 games. I've seen our guys pitch dozens of times. And anybody who's a real fan of a particular team can tell when a pitcher has suddenly lost it. Every serious baseball fan is an armchair manager.

[Q] Playboy: Do you try to run the team as George Steinbrenner runs the Yankees, sending messages to your manager?

[A] Turner: Never during the game. I will ask him afterward why he didn't take someone out. We run the club by committee, and I'm the chairman. I'm the skipper. When we're making the final cuts of spring training, we have all the coaches; the general manager; the director of scouting; the executive vice-president; Henry Aaron, who's minor-league director--maybe 25 or 30 people. And we evaluate everybody on the roster.

[Q] Playboy: Is the role of a good owner to support his team with bucks?

[A] Turner: You've got to do that. The owner signs the pay checks.

[Q] Playboy: You've established a pretty liberal checkbook. After your bad experience a few years ago with some costly free agents who did not work out, you told us you weren't going after any more hot players for "superbig loot." Yet this year, your salary structure topped $9,000,000, putting yours among the top half-dozen payrolls in professional baseball.

[A] Turner: Yeah, well, I told my guys that if they played championship ball, I'd pay them championship salaries.

[Q] Playboy: So you came in with the attitude of spending to build a better team.

[A] Turner: You can't make chicken salad out of chicken manure. But it's not just the bucks that make the difference. We created an exciting operation where guys want to sign with us. In most cases, our people make less than they could make somewhere else.

[Q] Playboy: Could you ever pay for it all with just the gate? Could the Braves ever make a profit without their own TV outlet?

[A] Turner: Absolutely not. We drew 1,800,000 fans last year, and that was just enough to break even. With our increased payroll this year, we would need to draw 2,800,000, and that we won't do.

[Q] Playboy: So you need to compete hard--and very loudly--against the networks to televise professional sports.

[A] Turner: I'm always talking about killing the opposition. But that's like Ali talking before a fight--a lot of it is designed to build up the gate.

[Q] Playboy: How do the readers of this interview avoid the suspicion that all your rhetoric about the networks is just beating the drum for a competitive product? You're condemning them as evil, not simply as competitors.

[A] Turner: That's right.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it's fair not only to claim you have a better product but, figuratively, to accuse the other salesmen of beating their wives? Because that's what you often sound like when you get wound up about other people's morality.

[A] Turner: Well, I truly believe it. You're asking the questions and I'm answering them. But don't ask me. Ask [fundamentalist preacher] Jerry Falwell. Ask [conservative Senator] Jesse Helms. Ask General Westmoreland.

[Q] Playboy: What do Falwell and Helms have to do with it?

[A] Turner: They think the networks are destructive and detrimental to our society, too. I'm not the only one. I've never met a college president who thought television was doing a good job for our nation. The trouble is that nobody dares blow the whistle on the networks because of their power. Somebody has to have the courage to stand up and say so.

[Q] Playboy: We don't understand: You were studying your own ratings when we got on the plane. Don't you need ratings to survive?

[A] Turner: Yeah, but not the way the networks do. I know a lot of things I could do to get my ratings up.

[Q] Playboy: For example?

[A] Turner: CNN could go the National Enquirer route instead of the New York Times or the Washington Post route. We could sneak cameramen in to take nude pictures of movie stars taking nude sun baths; we could dig up more dirt and scandal; we could run movies the networks won't run, ones that are bloody and gory, such as Friday the 13th; we could do programs with frontal nudity; we could do soap operas----

[Q] Playboy: You did launch a soap opera on your own network--The Catlins. Isn't that the same thing the networks do? Aren't extramarital affairs and unwanted pregnancies stock in trade of soap operas?

[A] Turner: I have to make some commercial sacrifices to get where I'm going. Christopher Columbus, when he set out for America, wasn't sure he wouldn't fall off the edge of the earth, either. Besides, Procter and Gamble, who are putting up the money for it, assured me there would be nothing in there I would be ashamed of.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned that you could run nudity--but wouldn't that cause the loss of the subscribers who you feel want uplifting programs?

[A] Turner: We might lose some. But the way the networks have done it is to stay one step ahead of the people with sleazy stuff; then the people catch up. They've been dragging the quality of the programing down a little bit each year by staying six months ahead of the public, getting sleazier and sleazier. Fred Silverman [the former president of NBC] was the master of it. He took us one step beyond where we'd been as far as dragging us down.

[Q] Playboy: In what kind of shows?

[A] Turner: More tits and ass. A little more tits and ass than the other guys have had.

[Q] Playboy: What about the advertising? Brooke Shields's Calvin Klein jeans ads created a furor.

[A] Turner: The networks are increasingly touchy about that because of all the pressure that's been brought to bear on them.

[Q] Playboy: By Donald Wildmon? [Wildmon is the conservative minister who formed the hard-line Coalition for Better Television.]

[A] Turner: By Donald Wildmon and Ted Turner. When I started criticizing the networks publicly about four years ago, I gave them the strongest and most effective indictments that had ever been made. In the past, they had always been able to write off their critics. Almost no Senators or Congressmen or Presidents had ever criticized them really strongly. Nixon did it a little, because they tried to smear him. People in Government are afraid, because they get re-elected based on the way they're covered in the media. The corporations of America couldn't criticize the networks, because if they did, Sixty Minutes would come after them. I mean, journalism takes cheap shots at everyone. And also, the networks can raise their advertising rates, because they charge one company more than another. So nobody in business can criticize them. They've intimidated any meaningful critics. In most cases, the newspapers own the television stations. So any young television writer who criticizes the networks too much, particularly about First Amendment considerations, is putting his own future in jeopardy.

There's generally a tendency in the media not to criticize one another. It's kind of an unspoken law, because nobody's got lily-white skirts. You don't blow the whistle on me, I won't blow it on you. Besides, there are interlocking directorates among all those big companies. So the only criticism came from a few ministers and a few educators. And the networks were always able to dismiss them by saying they were a bunch of liberal kooks.

[Q] Playboy: Or right-wing kooks.

[A] Turner: Depending on which group it was. Ralph Nader criticized them as much as anyone else. But because I was in the television business and was criticizing from the inside, they couldn't very well call me an idealistic kook. I could use specific examples that I had learned inside the business, quoting them off the record. Nobody at the networks would have a conversation with Wildmon. They'd give him the widest berth possible, because he'd get information from them. No television person ever met with Wildmon the way they have with me and told him off the record that they were ashamed of the programing that they were putting on. But they told me. So when I blew the whistle on them, it was so effective that, as I told you, the president of the National Association of Broadcasters has offered to drop their opposition to us in Washington--trying to put us out of business legally--in return for my promise to quit being a media watchdog.

[During a brief break in the interview, Turner was engaged by an Atlanta passenger in a chat about the Braves' prospects for 1983. At that point, Liz Wickersham, Turner's companion, leaned over to our interviewer and only half-jokingly suggested that it would be fitting if she posed for the cover of the issue in which Turner's interview appeared. Wickersham wasPlayboy's cover model for the April 1981 issue.]

[Q] Playboy: We were talking about Wildmon and his attempt to impose his moral standards on TV. With network advertisers, his tactic is to threaten a boycott.

[A] Turner: They've tried everything else.

[Q] Playboy: Then let's talk about how consistent your standards are. Last Christmas, we watched wtbs and CNN a lot in Atlanta and saw what we considered quite provocative ads--for panty hose and lingerie--on your channels. The J. C. Penney lingerie ad was a kind of striptease, an absolute burlesque.

[A] Turner: I don't agree with you. I've never objected to the commercials, except maybe commercials for R-rated movies. I don't think there's anything wrong with a little bit of sex appeal.

[Q] Playboy: Then what do you mean when you attack sex on television?

[A] Turner: I'm talking about gratuitous sex and homosexuality and philandering around. As long as it's your wife or your girlfriend, I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

[Q] Playboy: But you have specifically attacked the networks, saying they don't have enough programs that show healthy family situations. The women are always out having affairs, you claim. What about The Catlins? The heart of soap opera is infidelity, isn't it?

[A] Turner: I don't know. That's what people tell me.

[Q] Playboy: Well, why are you showing it, then? Because it pays a good dollar?

[A] Turner: Because I really need the money. You're just coming back and trying to get an answer from me. I said that I do some things. ... I never said I was perfect. I don't just have my own personal standards that run my network. There are a number of things we are doing. ... I don't feel like I'm really compromising my principles.

[Q] Playboy: But you said you're doing the soap opera for the money.

[A] Turner: That is a consideration. That is a consideration.

[Q] Playboy: We raise the issue only because you are so vociferous in your criticism of others who do the same thing.

[A] Turner: That's right.

[Q] Playboy: The networks answer that they have the soaps because there are 45,000,000 women who want to watch them in the afternoon.

[A] Turner: That's true.

[Q] Playboy: Well, 25,000,000 people may want to watch something as spicy at night.

[A] Turner: But there's something else. I have to make more sacrifices than the networks do. If I were rich enough, we'd be even cleaner than we are today. But I've got to get where I'm going in order to do that. I'm not proud of everything we're doing from a commercial standpoint. But our standards are a hell of a lot higher than theirs are!

[Q] Playboy: But can you raise your standards higher than what people want?

[A] Turner: Oh, absolutely, you can. And if you do, you go out of business.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that what you're trying to do? Trying to force people to come up to your standards?

[A] Turner: I'm not trying to force them!

[Q] Playboy: Then you're going to raise standards and hope that audiences follow?

[A] Turner:[Pauses] You are about to lose the rest of your interview!

[Q] Playboy: I'm just asking----

[A] Turner: Well, I'm tired of it!

[Q] Playboy: I'm sorry if you feel----

[A] Turner: I am one second away from never asking [sic] you another question! I'm sick as hell of you!

[Q] Playboy: Now, Ted----

[A suddenly violent Turner snatched the tape recorder out of Range's hand and smashed it to the cabin floor. "I heard a thump and thought, Oh, my God, what's happened now?" remembered Eastern Airlines' senior flight attendant Chris Mink later. In a belligerent rage, Turner then threw Range's camera bag full of tapes into the aisle. He kicked it full force against the cockpit door, slightly bruising Mink as it hit her thigh.

["We heard a bang against the door and didn't know what was going on," said Captain Albert Dean afterward.

[Swearing and shouting, Turner began to stomp on the bag. Tiny fragments of the plastic tape boxes were scattered about the cabin carpeting, like pieces of a shattered window. He then threw the bag at Range's head while Range was retrieving the pieces of the smashed tape recorder. Another flight attendant began picking up broken cassettes and tape boxes.

[The passengers in the first-class cabin were stunned. The crew, equally shocked, attempted to soothe Turner. Flight attendant Mink later said she thought she saw Turner pick up something from the debris knocked out of Range's tape bag and stuff it into his pocket. Turner then sat down next to Liz Wickersham. Some minutes later, he went past the forward galley into the lavatory.

[During Turner's brief absence, Liz Wickersham confided to Range, "He's under a lot of pressure. He did the same thing to me once, getting on a boat in Greece. He got mad and kicked me in the shins."

[Turner returned from the lavatory and said to no one in particular, "It's the same thing I did on the Tom Cottle Show. (During a taping of an interview show, Turner, displeased by host Cottle's questioning, abruptly walked off the set. As he did so, he ripped up the release form he had signed, effectively preventing Cottle from airing the interview that had been completed up to that point.) Turner then turned to Range and said, "I'll replace your tape recorder." Range declined Turner's offer.

[The flight reached Las Vegas an hour later. After the plane emptied, Range began a search for two missing tapes. Stewardess Mink then mentioned what she had seen Turner stuff into his pocket and also recalled seeing him put something into the galley trash bins.

[Range began a systematic search through the muck of the galley garbage. Several broken cassette boxes surfaced but no tapes. Finally, he turned to the first-class lavatory and searched in vain through the trash. During a final sweep of the galley garbage, his fingers closed around a tape box with its cassette still inside. The box was undamaged--but it had been under water for more than an hour.

[On the return flight to Washington, Range dried the tape inch by inch. The following day, with the help of a stereo expert, he was able to unjam the cassette and play it successfully. The tape contained half of the three-hour airborne interview. The other missing tape, containing an opening conversation at the Atlanta airport, was never found. Turner denied taking any of the tapes from the airplane. The preceding interview was transcribed from the earlier tapes and from the tape that survived Turner's assault.]

"I thought 'Gandhi' was terrific. It shows that you can win through nonviolence"

"The way the networks covered the Vietnam war just sickened me. It was anti-American. I know our leaders were very unhappy about it."

"we're reporting the news as it happens, and that's never happened before in the history of the world on television."

"I once said the worst enemies the U.S. ever faced weren't the Nazis but the network bosses. CBS' William Paley didn't deny the charge. Why not?"

"In prime time there are no choices on the networks. Only stupidity, sex and violence."