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.
Turner’s death 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 Longtime TV analyst Robert Thompson.
“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.
“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.
For CNN, a moment of particular success came in October 1987, the year after the Challenger explosion, when 18-monthold 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.
But it was during the first Gulf War with Iraq when the entire foundation of news shifted. When other journalists left Baghdad, CNN stayed.
“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,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University.
Associated Press