Cable News Network (CNN)

The Cable News Network (CNN) began modestly in 1980 in the United States as the first 24-hour, all-news television channel in the United States, transmitted on cable television systems. A few years later, it had changed not only the broadcasting landscape but also the daily TV information flow, which occurs without borders on a global scale.

Created in Atlanta, Georgia, by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, CNN was based on a small, independent local cable channel. But a new era began with the all-news format distributed through a network of cable systems. In 1982, CNN created a second channel, Headline News, and in 1985, it added CNN International based in London, which initially aimed at European countries and later expanded globally. CNN provided an American alternative to the BBC as an English-language global news medium. The value of CNN as a 24-hour global news source became clear during the first Gulf War, when it began war coverage on January 17, 1991, during the terrorist attacks and subsequent events of September 11, 2001, and during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the meantime, however, CNN faced new competition as a global news medium from other cable and satellite news channels and from the Internet. The originality of CNN, with CNN Domestic also broadcasting in Canada and CNN International broadcast in more than 150 countries, lies in the construction of a network of permanent offices and journalists-correspondents throughout the world (including Moscow, Cuba, and Beijing), which provided TV information flow, including “breaking news” and investigative reporting. With the technologies of its time (cables in the vicinity and satellites covering the world), CNN created a network for its channels comparable with those constructed more than 100 years before by international press agencies like Havas (in 1832, becoming Agence France Presse [AFP] in 1944), Associated Press (AP, in 1848), Reuters (in 1851), or United Press Association (UP, in 1907). CNN's success can also be attributed to other aspects of the global media space, such as TV subscription managers, who included CNN in their subscription packages, and hotels, which until 1987 were the only private firms accessing CNN.

The global significance of CNN is that it created an opportunity for governments, elites, upper classes, international CEOs, English-speaking populations, travelers, and tourists to have access to 24-hour TV news regardless of the time in their local time zones. Many people around the world saw the space shuttle Challenger explode live on January 28, 1986, and most of the world's TV channels used CNN's footage of that event. Similarly, many viewed CNN broadcasts of the fall of the Berlin Wall and “the Romanian Revolution” in [Page 150]1989, the Gulf War of 1991 (with live video feed from Baghdad, Riyadh, and Jerusalem), the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995, the congressional hearings during the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, September 11, 2001, the Second Gulf War or Iraq war in 2003, the Tsunami in South Asia in 2004, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

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