Forty-six years ago, Ted Turner achieved a new milestone by launching Cable News Network, the first 24-hour cable news channel. Turner, who died May 6 at age 87, began his media empire when he took over his father’s billboard business in the 1960s. He turned his attention to radio and television, and by 1970, he had acquired the Atlanta-based UHF channel that later became the cable channel TBS.
In 1978, Turner approached media executive Rhys Schoenfeld about creating the country’s first cable news channel. The pair co-founded CNN, and while Schoenfeld had a journalism background, Turner was more interested in capitalizing on burgeoning satellite technology and boasted that he knew “a squat” about news.
“We were working around the clock and had no idea what it was going to be, but we knew we were doing something no one had done before,” recalls Rick Davis, CNN’s longest-serving executive, who retired in 2021 after 40 years at the channel. When it debuted on June 1, 1980, CNN employed 300 and was headquartered in Atlanta. Its offices included a Los Angeles office on Sunset Boulevard that remained open until 2024, when employees moved to the Burbank campus of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
“We won’t sign until the end of the world,” Turner boldly stated before launch, and the team even recorded a doomsday video to be broadcast during the end of the world. Initially derided as the “chicken noodle network,” CNN avoided bankruptcy early on, but stabilized by the end of its first decade. It gained credibility as the only television outlet to provide live coverage from Baghdad at the start of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. “That was a proud moment,” Davis says of CNN’s reporting on the famous Gulf War. Today, the channel is known not only for cultivating on-air talent such as Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Larry King, Anthony Bourdain and Tucker Carlson, but also for inspiring the creation of competitors such as Fox News, which Rupert Murdoch launched in 1996. The CNN team remains proud of Turner’s legacy, said former CNN president Tom Johnson. THR In 2012, he “had an almost fanatical belief that we should be fair.”
This story appeared in the May 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
