REMEMBERING CNN CO-FOUNDER.
Reese Schonfeld, a news executive who teamed with businessman Ted Turner to launch CNN, the world’s first 24-hour news network, then co-founded the Food Network, died July 28 at home in Manhattan, at 88. He had Alzheimer’s disease.
In the mid-1970s he met Turner, a brash cable TV entrepreneur. Schonfeld, who had been thinking about developing a 24-hour news network for several years, never expected Turner to bankroll it.
“I hate news! I’ll never do news!” Turner often said, Schonfeld recalled in 2005. But with dramas, comedies, movies and sports dominated by other networks, news was the only option.
In 1979, Schonfeld became CNN’S first president.
He wanted Dan Rather as their first anchor, but when Rather stayed with CBS, he hired Daniel Schorr, Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw.
CNN aimed to provide as much live coverage of breaking news as possible, supplemented by analysis and policy debates.
Schonfeld failed to recognize the on-air potential of an early CNN employee, Katie Couric, and regretted rejecting a tryout tape from a young Oprah Winfrey.
He tried to hire Orson Welles to host a nightly talk show, he wrote in his 2001 memoir, Me and Ted Against the World, but “CNN was a low-rent operation, and Orson Welles was not a lowrent guy.”
Within two years, the founders’ egos began to clash.
Turner disapproved of Schonfeld’s hiring of Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden to argue conservative and liberal viewpoints on Crossfire, which ultimately became one of CNN’S most popular programs, and fired Schonfeld in 1982.
Later, despite having no interest in cooking, he co-founded the Food Network, which debuted in 1993.
Maurice Wolfe Schonfeld was born Nov. 5, 1931, in Newark, N.J.
At Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1953, he supplemented his income from winnings at poker and bridge. When he was a senior, he and a partner won a national bridge tournament.
Kicked out of Harvard Law for gambling, he took a low-level job with United Press Movietone News, which produced newsreels for theatres. While working full-time, he studied law at Columbia, graduating in 1959, but never practised.