| Topic Name: |
CNN 25-Year Trivia |
| Message Name: |
WOLD |
| Date Posted: |
05/19/2005 |
| In Reply To: |
I worked at the LA bureau way back in the day. It was fun for awhile. Lunch time was spent drinking beers and eating 25 cent roast beef sandwiches at Simply Blues on the top floor. The anti-union thing was a bit too much to take though. The techs at the time worked for a subcontractor, WOLD communications and were treated like peons by the CNN jergoffs from Atlanta. |
| Message: |
The dirty little secret was that CNN was paying WOLD $25/hour for those technicians ("peons"), a very handsome rate at the time, but WOLD was paying them $6 - $7/hour and pocketing the rest. For a while CNN was making editors work 10-hour shifts but only paying them for eight. When the HR guy in Atlanta got wind of this illegal practice he got on the next plane to L.A. and put a stop to it.
Late at night people used to go up to Simply Blues, and when the elevator would stop on the CNN floor, people would see the logo and say, "Oh, CNN ... Ted Turner ... Atlanta". That's all they knew about CNN at the time. A few hours later, you would see those same people coming back down the elevator, but this time they were shit-faced. The Sunset-Vine tower is now vacant and I'm told it was condemned due to electrical problems.
I never had CNN at home because I could not justify the luxury of cable on my salary. How ironic that I could not afford to consume the very product that I worked on every day. The only reason CNN dealt with WOLD and all those fly-by-night contractors was that Ted was loathe to deal with unions. Even when CNN started turning a profit in the mid-'80s they still paid shit and treated the techs like peons. Ted Turner now owns half the state of Montana.
Now, who hurled the scanner radio?
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