Tune In To 'Up All Night' For The Story Of Daniel Schorr And The Birth Of CNN
Ted Turner and Daniel Schorr: Doesn't sound like a likely match, does it?
The Mouth of the South, as Ted Turner was called, and Murrow Boy Dan Schorr — one was on President Nixon's Enemies List when he covered the Watergate investigations for CBS. The other made some of his own worst enemies with, well, intemperate remarks.
Yet the first major "Just imagine Dan Schorr in Las Vegas, walking into a hotel suite in which Ted Turner sat with a lady friend. Dan said to him, 'Look, I will not do something I don't want to do. I need it written into my contract that I don't have to do any promotions, that I don't have to say anything I don't want to say,'" says Lisa Napoli. She writes about this moment — and many others — in her new book, . Schorr, she says, "had this contentious problem with CBS. So he didn't want to repeat it, and he didn't trust Ted. So he went downstairs and wrote out by hand his contract and it said, 'I will not have to say anything I don't want to.' And Ted said, 'no problem,' and signed it, and the rest is history. He was the first employee."
