CNN, Has A Doomsday Plan in the Can

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Turner's Lost Love, CNN, Has A Doomsday Plan in the Can

NY Daily News

Ted Turner, who has battled depression for most of his adult life, is feeling low these days and is filled with regret at having merged his brainchild, CNN, with Time Warner in 1996.

Sources say the Mouth of the South has been telling friends that if he had it to do over, he would have held on to the 24-hour-a-day news channel.

Let's not forget that he's saying these things at a time when war coverage — and Americans — are filled with uncertainty.

But Turner, it seems, has been a doom-and-gloom kind of guy from the very day in June 1980 when he launched the cable network. He said then, as only he could, "We gonna go on air June 1, and we gonna stay on until the end of the world. When that time comes, we'll cover it, play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee,' and sign off."

Ten years later, I'm told, Turner used CNN production facilities to create what he called his "end-of-the-world" video. Sources tell me it consists of a recording of "Nearer, My God," over footage of a waving American flag. Turner is said to have ordered the tape locked away until it was determined that the world was about to end.

"It was like a sign-off tape that you often see in the middle of the night," says one source. "But to Ted, it was a sign-off forever."

Turner's assistant in Atlanta said her boss was traveling outside the country and could not be reached for comment.

-- PHO (owennos@bigfoot.com), November 01, 2001


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