Cable News Network (CNN)

The Cable News Network (CNN) is an Atlanta-based television network that broadcasts news and informational programming twenty-four hours a day. Created by media mogul Ted Turner, CNN first went on the air in 1980 and became a pioneer network in the expanding basic cable market of the era. The network struggled financially at first and was mocked by competitors, but as it began to find an audience, it changed the way television news was reported. CNN was purchased in 1996 by media giant Time Warner Inc. and in 2024 reached 49.6 million viewers each month.

History

Television news in the United States before 1980 was dominated by the three major networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC. Each network provided a half-hour nightly newscast that was broadcast around dinnertime each evening. The hosts, or "anchors," of these newscasts became public celebrities. While networks provided additional coverage for major events, the nightly broadcasts were the primary source of news for television viewers.

In the late 1970s, a flamboyant Georgia businessman named Robert "Ted" Turner saw an opportunity to change that. Turner had bought a failing Atlanta TV station in the early 1970s and brought it back to profitability. Noticing that the subscription cable channel Home Box Office (HBO) was transmitting its programming across the United States via satellite, Turner wanted to expand his station's audience in the same way. In December 1976, he created the nation's first "superstation" by beaming the signal from his network into homes coast to coast. Within a few years, SuperStation WTBS became a financial success and opened the door for the further expansion of cable television.

While WTBS primarily aired reruns of old TV shows and Atlanta-based sports programming, Turner wanted to bring the "superstation' concept to television news. He began to assemble a team of news executives, reporters, and producers and established news bureaus across the world. On June 1, 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) went on the air for the first time, broadcasting to about 1.7 million homes. CNN's first story was about the attempted assassination of civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. Jordan was a friend of then-president Jimmy Carter, and when Carter addressed the media after visiting Jordan in the hospital, CNN was the only network with live coverage. CNN broadcasted news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, relying on a team of mostly unknown anchors and reporters—a departure from the star power of ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Despite the advantage CNN had over the competition in timeliness, the fledgling network did not have the ratings power of the major networks. The number of initial subscribers was not enough to cover its substantial costs, and CNN came close to failing in its first year. Competitors derided CNN's financial woes and format, referring to it as the "Chicken Noodle Network." Turner continued to believe in his network and kept investing in it until CNN began to gain subscribers and credibility in the 1980s. In addition to breaking news coverage, CNN also offered several prime-time series on political, financial, and entertainment topics. On January 1, 1982, CNN spun off a sister station, CNN Headline News, which condensed the day's news cycle into continuously running, half-hour segments.

As cable television continued to grow, CNN began to have a greater impact on television news. Several events in the 1980s helped propel the network from cable upstart to one of the world's leading information sources. One of the biggest occurred on January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing the seven crew members on board. While major networks were running their weekday game shows and soap operas, CNN was covering the liftoff live and broadcast the disaster as it happened. As a shocked nation learned of the explosion, many tuned in to CNN while the other networks took time to break into their programming.

The network's most influential moment came five years later when US forces began bombing Baghdad, Iraq, during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. CNN had a team of reporters on the ground in Iraq and covered the beginning of the war live on the air. Americans were captivated by the night-vision images of falling bombs, explosions, and return fire from Iraqi troops being beamed into their living rooms. While other networks covered the war as well, CNN was the only one to broadcast the events twenty-four hours a day—it did not have to break away to accommodate a lineup of network TV shows.

CNN's blanket coverage of the war changed the way TV news was reported and spawned a number of competing cable news outlets in the 1990s. The network also helped create a phenomenon called the "CNN Effect," in which nonstop media coverage of events had an effect on US foreign policy decisions. In 1996, Ted Turner sold his cable empire, including CNN, to media conglomerate Time Warner for $7.3 billion. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, CNN continued to cover news events but also expanded its format to include more political discussion, entertainment topics, and travel programming.

With eleven bureaus in the United States and thirty-three others in foreign countries, CNN was the largest cable news network in 2015. The network was available in more than 97 million households in the United States and was the second-largest cable network behind only the Weather Channel. Its online division, CNN.com, was one of the most trafficked news websites with 64 million unique visitors in January 2015. The Republican presidential debate on September 16, 2015, pulled in the network's highest ratings in its history with 22.9 million viewers. The previous high was a 1993 political debate that drew 16.8 million.

Though, having become part of the newly merged company Warner Bros. Discovery in early 2022, CNN reported that its services were available to over 2 billion people in more than two hundred countries and territories by July 2022, cable television networks in general had begun to experience declines in subscribers and viewers in the 2010s. Facing competition from increasingly abundant and accessible digital television and film streaming services, CNN announced the launch of its own stand-alone subscription streaming service, CNN+, in March 2022 to offer unique programming. Following a poor performance and restructuring moves, including staffing cuts, initiated by Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN+ ceased operation in April. Still, CNN's digital services and content, in terms of its website, apps, and social media, remained popular.

Despite setbacks such as the failure of CNN+, the network enjoyed some considerable successes during the early 2020s. For example, in 2023, CNN senior crime and justice correspondent Shimon Prokupecz and his CNN teammates won a Peabody Award for their coverage of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. In June of 2024, CNN hosted a presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. The program was the biggest in CNN's history and it resulted in a nationwide discussion that ultimately resulted in Joe Biden stepping out of the race and his vice President, Kamala Harris, stepping in as the Democratic candidate.

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