Ted Turner Invented CNN, and Changed My Life
By Dan Brown CNN is partly responsible for me becoming a journalist. Which means Ted Turner – the hard-driving businessman who launched the Atlanta-based all-news channel in 1980 – is partly responsible for me being a journo. Turner died Wednesday at age 87. Media reports described how, among other accomplishments, he was the driving force behind CNN. Keep in mind, the 24-hour news format was a novel one at the time it began broadcasting. The only all-news outfit I can recall predating CNN was the CKO radio network here in Ontario. As a little kid, it took me a while – even though I delivered The London Free Press in the 1970s – to wrap my head around the idea of a radio station, then a TV channel, airing nothing but news. Who would watch that? Well, I started watching CNN when my family got a grey-market satellite dish. A lot of rural families, like ours, were early adopters since they didn’t have access to cable. There wasn’t a lot to watch out in Coldstream. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, that huge black metal dish was my gateway to the world, introducing me to channels like MTV, Comedy Central, and HBO. Then, with its coverage of the first Gulf War in 1990-91, CNN became must-watch TV. Such CNN journalists as Peter Arnett refused to leave Baghdad before the U.S. assault on Iraq, and as has been stated elsewhere, often brought viewers the news of attacks and military maneuvers before they were announced by the Pentagon. For an audience raised on traditional network coverage, it was an exciting time. The channel’s derisive nickname, Chicken Noodle News, disappeared quickly after that conflict. I had been a “news junkie” up until then, reading every newspaper and magazine I could find. CNN opened up a whole new world of possibilities to me. If the plucky news channel had a personality like a human being, it was a can-do, anti-establishment vibe. By the time of the O.J. Simpson trial a few years later, I was a full-fledged CNN fan and well into my two years at Ryerson University’s journalism school. I loved CNN’s little quirks, like how there were multiple on-air personalities with alliterative names, including Catherine Crier, Sherri Sylvester and Valeria Voss. I landed an interview with chief political correspondent Candy Crowley a few years into my career, and she conceded Ted Turner might’ve shown a preference for journalists with monikers like his own. Eventually, my career took a bit of a left turn from newspapers and I had the opportunity to work for a satellite network myself. As a senior writer, I toiled at NewsWorld International, headquartered in Toronto, which served world news to an audience of American viewers. The rumour at the time was then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had one of the TVs in his Pentagon office tuned to us. Now, readers perusing this column in 2026 may feel that CNN is too slanted in its coverage. If you want to slam the network Turner started, go ahead. I don’t watch it much now, haven’t for years. The change in my viewing habits has nothing to do with CNN being left wing or right wing. It has to do with the proliferation of panel shows – CNN is more like a chat network than one that sends reporters out into the field to find interesting stories in far-flung locations. Most of its programming involves partisan talking heads. In the old days, panelists on those shows were typically experts who covered a specific subject matter. They have been replaced over the years by experts who don’t want to describe reality as it is, but instead seek to create a new reality by means of their punditry. Recently, I saw someone on X saying CNN should launch a panel-free version of its service. That is actually what it did at the outset and for many years after, time enough for me to fall in love with broadcast journalism as deeply as I already was with print. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group.
