How Ted Turner’s vision of news as global, 24/7 changed society
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Beth Knobel, a future TV news correspondent, was in graduate school. Emerging from class, she saw TV sets had been set up in the lobby. They were tuned to CNN, the 24/7 news channel that Ted Turner had launched about five years earlier, which was carrying the launch live.
“Shuttle launches were just kind of routine and the broadcast networks weren’t even covering them anymore,” says Knobel, who worked for CBS News in the 1990s and now teaches journalism at Fordham University. “CNN did. So when things went so tragically wrong, there they were on top of the story like no one else.”
That, says Knobel, who now teaches a class on TV’s biggest innovators, is just one example of why Turner was the biggest of them all—huge steps ahead of anyone else in his understanding of how news needed to be delivered.
Fraught time
Turner’s death on Wednesday comes at a fraught time for cable news, which has struggled to retain viewership in an era of countless media choices and abundant streaming video.
CNN has not been immune; changes in the media ecosystem, the company’s financial picture, and multiple editorial resets over the years have left it a markedly different entity than the one Turner built.
But that misses an important point: He built it.
“I can think of very few other things in the 20th century that so dramatically changed American politics, journalism, and civic engagement than the invention of 24-hour cable news,” said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.
For a long time, and certainly well into the 90s, “CNN became almost generic for breaking news,” Thompson added, “like Kleenex for facial tissues and Xerox for photocopying.”
Foundational shift
It isn’t just the 24-hour cycle that defines Turner’s legacy in news, but also how he conceived of news as a global commodity.
Knobel recalls that when she was Moscow bureau chief for CBS beginning in the early 1990s, she would walk into the Kremlin and see CNN on televisions.
The same was true in other seats of power across the world. “Global programming didn’t exist before Ted Turner came along and said, ‘Not only am I going to build a new channel for America, but there are a lot of people around the world that will probably want to watch this news channel.’”
For CNN, a moment of particular success came in October 1987, the year after the Challenger explosion, when 18-month-old Jessica McClure was rescued from a well in Texas after a two-day ordeal. CNN covered not only the outcome but the incremental developments—standard fare today but certainly not so then for TV.
It was during the first Gulf War with Iraq when the entire foundation of news shifted. When other journalists left Baghdad, CNN stayed. With correspondents Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett doing reports under siege from Baghdad’s al-Rashid Hotel, the network changed war journalism forever.
After CNN found success, more and more outlets followed suit. The uptick in competition for around-the-clock content made time even more of a currency when it came to breaking news.
“I think one of the consequences is the race for eyeballs within the saturated media landscape,” Duffy said. “Time is the currency in news media.”
