Television producers Jonathan Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim didn’t set out to change the landscape of media when they approached MTV in 1991 about their idea for a soap opera centered on a hodgepodge of 20-somethings based in the East Village of Manhattan.
They just wanted to tell good human interest stories.
St. Mark’s Place — a neighborhood known for its assortment of street vendors and eclectic nightlife — was not only supposed to be the location of the show but the title as well. However, while MTV executives loved the idea, the network was barely a decade old and shied away from the price tag of the scripted show. Undeterred, Murray and Bunim pitched an unscripted version they could produce with lower overhead. They renamed the show “The Real World,” and in the spring of 1992, it was on air. The surprise success of the first season led to a second. For better or worse, the reality TV genie has been out of its bottle ever since.
When I asked Murray what it was like seeing his earnest curiosity about the human condition be stripped of authenticity and commodified for the masses, he smiled before saying that as a creative you can only control what you can control.
That’s a bitter truism that would seem to cloud the legacy of Ted Turner, the media mogul who created cable’s first superstation and revolutionized television journalism with the introduction of CNN back in 1980. Turner died this week after a long battle with Lewy body dementia. He was 87.
Known for his risk-taking, Turner built his media empire after taking over his father’s billboard company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, when he was only 24. He began by first acquiring radio stations before buying a fledgling television station in Atlanta in 1970. That eventually became the country’s first superstation, broadcasting a signal far beyond the Atlanta area. However, it was the launching of CNN, the first 24-hour news station, that turned Turner into a household name.
Those who knew him best said he believed the network would bring people together globally by offering nonstop coverage of world events. Known for reminding journalists at CNN that the news is the star, Turner maintained control of his network until 1996, when he sold it to Time Warner for nearly $7.5 billion.
When the deal was made, Turner was supposed to stay on to guide CNN’s news coverage, but it wasn’t too long before he found himself pushed out. And just as Murray saw what capitalism did to the genre of modern reality TV that he and Bunim co-created, Turner was forced to watch the 24-hour news industry morph from a tool to build connection and understanding into a cash cow driven by division.
Toward the end of his life, he often said his second greatest regret was losing control of his baby (the biggest was his three failed marriages). When I worked at CNN, Turner was no longer in charge, but his images and words still adorned the walls of headquarters in Atlanta. Over the years, controversy with the White House and ratings struggles have come to dominate the headlines about the network, but its core mission never changed for the journalists inside.
However, it’s the rules of capitalism, not human connection, that determine what 24-hour news channels choose to broadcast. It’s the rules of capitalism, and not the defense of democracy, that determine personnel and coverage decisions.
With news as the star during the Turner years, CNN’s potential was dictated by truth and facts, protected by the call of journalism. After Turner sold the station, he was forced to watch a new metric take over not only his company but also the entire industry: getting the most eyeballs no matter what. This metric free from the handcuffs of journalistic integrity would usher in more revenue, but it would no longer do what Turner originally set out to do — bring us together.
Nowadays when you talk to people about cable news, many express frustration and look to avoid it altogether. And when you talk about reality TV, few believe what we are watching is real. The true human experience isn’t nearly as sensational; we know this. But we’re drawn to the spectacle of it all nonetheless, much as we are drawn to the conflict that now dominates cable news. That is not good for society of course, but as long as we’re willing to tune in, we’re going to continue to see programming that pursues profit over civility. Profit over humanity. Profit over most anything else. This was true when the cotton industry was the backbone of America’s economy, despite the immorality of chattel slavery; this was true when the tobacco industry withheld the harmful effects of smoking from the public to protect cigarette sales; this is true today as the desire to monetize clicks and likes supersedes the harm caused by disingenuous rage bait. Which is why the potential for goodwill stemming from artificial intelligence is accompanied by a reasonable fear that capitalists will error on the side of profit, as opposed to caution.
Turner’s entrepreneurial spirit transformed television — and I believe society as a whole is better for it. But because the nature of capitalism requires constant growth, there is something fundamental that media trailblazers such as Turner and Murray could not change: In America, it isn’t news, voters or a hodgepodge of 20-somethings who are the stars of the show.
It’s money.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow