NEW YORK – In 1986, when the Space Shuttle Challenger tragically exploded, Beth Knobel was a graduate student, destined to become a TV news correspondent. Exiting her class, she noticed TV screens set up in the lobby, all tuned to CNN. This 24-hour news channel, launched by Ted Turner five years earlier, was broadcasting the shuttle launch live.
“Space shuttle launches had become routine, and the major TV networks had stopped covering them,” recalls Knobel, who later worked with CBS News in the 1990s and now teaches journalism at Fordham University. “But CNN was there. So when the disaster struck, they were uniquely positioned to cover the story like no other.”
Knobel, who now teaches about television’s greatest innovators, believes this incident exemplifies why Turner was a trailblazer in the industry. He was leaps ahead in recognizing the need for continuous news delivery.
Turner’s passing occurs during a challenging period for cable news, which is grappling with declining viewership amid a landscape filled with diverse media options and streaming services. CNN has felt these pressures too, undergoing numerous changes and editorial shifts that have transformed its identity from what Turner originally envisioned.
Yet, it’s essential to remember: Turner laid the foundation.
“We often label people as giants without merit,” Knobel notes. “Ted Turner genuinely was a giant. He pioneered 24-hour news broadcasting.”
Early on, Turner saw news as something global
Many in and around the news industry struggled Wednesday for big enough words to describe Turner’s impact on how we consume news. Longtime TV analyst Robert Thompson said the issue was hyperbole-proof.
“Death and hyperbole often go together,” said Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. ”But there is no hyperbole here. 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.”
He does add a caveat: The real impact would not be truly felt until others started doing it. Which, of course, they did. But for a long time, and certainly well into the 90s, “CNN became almost generic for breaking news,” Thompson says,” like Kleenex for facial tissues and Xerox for photocopying.”
But it isn’t just the 24-hour cycle that defines Turner’s legacy in news. A number of analysts cited, too, 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.
“That was the way in which they came to understand what the world was thinking about Russia,” Knobel says. 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.’”
All of this has become so ingrained by now that it’s hard to convey to younger people that it once didn’t exist. Back in the ’70s when Turner — an insomniac — was first dreaming of 24/7 news, in many places you’d turn on your TV late at night and would see only static, a test pattern or an American flag until about 6 am.
Former CNN White House bureau chief Frank Sesno, now a media and public affairs professor at George Washington University, tells his students about the “Walter Cronkite era” — when news was delivered at an appointed time, by a voice from on high, in a 30-minute broadcast (which actually doubled the 15-minute broadcasts there once were.)
“I teach these young people and they have no idea who Ted Turner is,“ Sesno said. “I remind them this was, in fact, the world of Walter Cronkite. Ted Turner came in and and CNN was seen as an upstart, as something that wasn’t going to succeed.” Thus the derisive moniker “Chicken Noodle News,” which was echoing across the industry when Sesno joined the network in 1984 .
“When they hired me, I had zero television experience,” he says.
But CNN wasn’t looking for star anchors at the time. The news was supposed to be the star. The stable of stars came later.
The first Gulf War was a turning point
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.
Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University, points to public appetite for that story as a key moment for CNN, which covered the “hours and hours of waiting” and allowed audiences to regularly tune in for updates.
But 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.
A key factor was technology. CNN’s news managers “went to Turner and said you know, there’s a war coming. We need some money to cover it, and Ted Turner said to them well what do you need?” Knobel said. ”What they did with that money is to bring in satellite phone technology that no one else had.” It enabled CNN to continue to broadcast news when communications were knocked out.
“I’m someone who competed against CNN for many years working for CBS (and) I can say CNN always had a technological advantage over everybody else,” she said, crediting Turner for giving his network the edge.
The 24/7 schedule of broadcasting continuous developments also vastly reshaped what it was like to actually work in the TV news industry. Journalist were increasingly expected to “be available 24/7 to satiate the public’s appetite for news,” Duffy said.
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.”
