Ted Turner at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters on its launch day. Reporter Fred Saxon, of the network’s L.A. bureau, told THR in April 1980, “I think our Hollywood coverage will rival any broadcast medium.” Rick Diamond/Getty Images Forty-six years ago, Ted Turner covered new ground with the launch of Cable News Network, the first 24-hour news channel. Turner, who died May 6 at age 87, began his media empire when he took over his dad’s billboard business in the 1960s. He turned his attention to radio and TV and, by 1970, had acquired an Atlanta-based UHF channel that would become the cable channel TBS.
In 1978, Turner connected with media executive Reese Schonfeld about starting the nation’s first all-news channel. The pair co-founded CNN, and while Schonfeld had a journalism background, Turner was more interested in capitalizing on burgeoning satellite technology and would boast that he knew “diddly-squat” about news.
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“We were working around the clock and had no idea what it would become, but we just knew we were doing something that nobody had done before,” recalls Rick Davis, CNN’s longest-tenured executive, who retired in 2021 after 40 years with the channel. When it debuted June 1, 1980, CNN employed 300 staffers and was headquartered in Atlanta; its bureaus included an L.A. office on Sunset Boulevard that remained open until 2024, when staff shifted to the Burbank campus of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
“We won’t be signing off until the world ends,” Turner boldly stated ahead of the launch, with the team even recording a doomsday video to air during the apocalypse. Initially mocked as the “Chicken Noodle Network,” CNN skirted bankruptcy early on but had stabilized by the end of its first decade. It gained credibility as the only TV outlet with live coverage from Baghdad at the start of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. “That was such a moment of pride,” Davis says of CNN’s acclaimed Gulf War reporting. Today, the channel is known not only for cultivating such on-air talent as Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Larry King, Anthony Bourdain and Tucker Carlson, but also for inspiring the creation of rivals like Fox News, which Rupert Murdoch launched in 1996. CNN’s team remains proud of Turner’s legacy, as former CNN president Tom Johnson told THR in 2012, “He had a near-fanatical belief that we should be fair.”
This story appeared in the May 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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