The Rise And Fall Of CNN

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At exactly 5:00 p.m. EDT on Sunday evening, June 1, 1980, American cable subscribers watched something never seen before in the annals of broadcasting. A man with a noticeable gap between his front teeth, a dark mustache that stood out from his graying hair, and a hint of a Southern drawl appeared on their screens, quoting a poem by Ed Kessler:

“To act upon one’s convictions while others wait,

To create a positive force in a world where cynics abound,

To provide information to people when it wasn’t available before.”

That, the man explained, was the mission of this new TV channel. But there was more.

“We won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world live, and that will be our last event. We’ll play ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ before we sign off.”

A recording of The Star Spangled Banner came next, followed by a shot of a couple seated at an anchor desk.

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“Good evening,” the man announced. “I’m David Walker.”

“And I’m Lois Hart,” his wife and co-anchor said. “Now here’s the news.”

With that most unusual introduction out of the way, a most unusual TV network began its four-and-a-half-decade run. The Cable News Network (CNN) was up and running.

It was the humblest of beginnings since a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem 2,000 years earlier. After all, there were only 50,000 viewers at first, not even enough to register a blip on the ratings radar. Yet it happened at a time when it seemed the world held no limits for broadcast visionaries who dared to think bigger than anyone ever had before. 

CNN was born amid the start of the Golden Era of cable television. Channels that would become broadcasting legends began popping up. ESPN had signed on the year before; MTV came the following year, and The Weather Channel arrived the year after that.

The network was an enormous gamble for entrepreneur Ted Turner. But he was used to playing long shots – and winning. 

Turner took the billboard advertising business he inherited from his father and used it to buy a broken-down local UHF TV station (Channel 17 to Atlanta viewers). He transformed this network into Superstation WTBS (now just TBS). Satellite technology was coming into its own, and cable subscribers from Back Bay Boston to San Francisco Bay were soon watching its mixture of TV reruns, corny old movies, and, of course, Atlanta Braves baseball.

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Turner had hit upon a financially winning formula, and the money began rolling in.

Then, he shocked the financial and broadcasting industries by doing the unthinkable. He pushed all of his chips to the middle of the table and bet everything he had on CNN. He staked his entire personal fortune – worth nearly $100 million (almost $400 million today) – on one roll of the dice.

Turner’s instincts told him there was an audience who wanted to watch the news on their own schedule, not just the early evening newscasts offered by the three main networks. In those days when precious few people had video recording devices, if you missed those reports, you had to wait until the next newspaper landed on your doorstep the following morning.

Turner also believed something else. There would be no big-dollar anchors; the news itself would be the star. It was a bold departure from the norm in the days when Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Frank Reynolds were household names seen by millions.

And just to make sure that nobody failed to notice CNN would be different from the pack, it would broadcast out of Atlanta – not from the traditional New York-Washington news axis.

It was a bumpy beginning. There were technical glitches, logistical headaches, and staffing challenges. (Remember, this was still the time when CNN was producing and broadcasting live newscasts 24 hours a day.)

Dismissed by the Big Three networks (who sneeringly said, “CNN stands for Chicken Noodle Network”), it slowly but steadily grew a following. Viewers rapidly discovered another big difference: when major breaking news was unfolding, they could watch it happening live on the upstart network. Turner cut deals with dozens of local stations around the country, allowing CNN to carry their live broadcasts whenever news was happening. For instance, when Delta Flight 191 crashed on its approach to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in August 1985, killing 136 people, CNN was airing coverage live from the scene while the Big Three networks were showing their game shows, soap operas, and sitcoms.

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Competition, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. ABC-TV decided it wanted a bite of the 24-hour news apple, so it partnered with Group W in launching the rival Satellite News Channel (SNC) in June 1982. It offered digestible newscasts (“Give us 18 minutes, and we’ll give you the world”) shown around the clock. 

But Turner did an end run and outflanked his rivals. He quickly put together CNN2 (soon rebranded as CNN Headline News), offering 48 streamlined newscasts around the clock without interruption. It had got the jump on SNC by going on the air on January 1. SNC was left playing catch-up and was snuffed in the cradle, signing off 1 year, 4 months, and 6 days later. 

CNN was now the undisputed king of the cable news hill (with Headline News snatching up SNC’s cable slots at bargain prices to boot).  

Politicians noticed an opportunity, too. Suddenly, a new media avenue became available, allowing them to communicate directly with millions of Americans while bypassing traditional news gatekeepers.

CNN reached adulthood on the night of January 16, 1991. With its live coverage of the launch of Operation Desert Storm during the Persian Gulf War, ratings shot through the roof. Iraqi officials had expelled Western journalists but allowed CNN’s team to stay because of the network’s global reach. Consequently, Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett had the only live reporting (from a room in the Al-Rashed Hotel inside Baghdad) as U.S. and coalition bombs began falling. 

They say the highest praise comes from your competition. Watching CNN’s live coverage that night, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw (who had succeeded Chancellor) said, “CNN used to be called the Little Network That Could. It’s no longer a little network.”

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CNN had officially arrived. It was now a major player in the news industry. And it coasted on that reputation for a decade. However, as the 21st Century got underway, CNN suddenly faced a midlife crisis – one that couldn’t be solved by buying a shiny new convertible or ditching the spouse for a younger trophy wife.

CNN was no longer the new kid on the block. In fact, students in each high school class since 2000 can’t remember living in a world without the network. To them, it has simply always been there.

Things have changed greatly since CNN went on the air. Jimmy Carter was president that Sunday evening in 1980 when it began broadcasting. There have been seven others in the years since.

The information age truly dawned, turning traditional broadcasting on its head. With the arrival of the internet and smartphone technology, viewers no longer have to rely on a television set set to see the news – and they are no longer limited to the choices offered to them by their cable provider. Consider the example of Delta Flight 191 mentioned earlier. Instead of relying solely on live coverage from CNN, today’s news consumers can visit the websites of local TV affiliates or newspapers to stream their coverage live. Or they can watch clips posted on social media.

Having outlived the reason for its creation nearly 50 years ago, CNN desperately tried to stay alive by adopting a highly partisan approach to its news coverage. But its timing was lousy. Two rivals, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, were both launched in 1996. The former cultivated a conservative audience while the latter developed a liberal base. 

As Americans drifted deeper into the current era of hyper-divisive politics, CNN had nowhere to go. It opted to lurch to the Left. Conservatives came to loathe it while Liberals said, “I’ve already got MSNBC; why do I need to go anywhere else?”

As viewership plummeted, CNN doubled down on its Trump-bashing, Biden-defending stand in 2024. 

Ted Turner sold a controlling interest in 1995, with CNN’s ownership bouncing from one media behemoth to another ever since. No one seems to know what to do with the fading legacy news channel, or just which direction it should head in the future.

Turner, now 86, is battling dementia and lives in a world he no longer understands. Sadly, the same is true for the once-revolutionary TV network he gave viewers 45 years ago this week.  

(Full disclosure: The author worked as a writer, senior news writer, and news editor at CNN and CNN Headline News from 1984-1986 and 1995-2009).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.

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