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.
All the President's Men continues to Inspire
By Dan Brown After Robert Redford died on Sept. 16, the accolades came pouring in. He was remembered as a legendary actor, director, advocate for the environment, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. What the rest of the world might not know is Redford also has a special place in the hearts of journalists of my generation. Even if you’re not a journo, you likely know Redford played real-life Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein in the 1976 feature-film adaptation of All the President’s Men, the duo’s account of their Watergate reporting, which ultimately led to Richard Nixon resigning as U.S. President. Redford fought to get the motion picture made. People told him Watergate was old news, that the country needed to move on in the aftermath of its long national nightmare, that a story about two journalists doing long hours of research wouldn’t play well on the big screen. But it did work, and All the President’s Men – the movie – is still inspiring media professionals all these decades later. It’s a journalism classic, and a perfect example of a 1970s paranoid thriller. I often turn to All the President’s Men – the book – to help inspire the young journalists I mentor at the Western Gazette, and teach at Western University. The worn paperback copy I have on my bookshelf has a picture of Redford and Hoffman on it, not the less photogenic Woodward and Bernstein. I like to remind my mentees and students that the two reporters, both in their 20s, weren’t all that much older than them when the Post helped to bring down Nixon. The book is a testament to the power of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. It wasn’t AI that helped the pair to trace the Watergate burglary back to the Oval Office, nor was it the internet. How primitive were the reporting tools back in the early 1970s? Heck, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t even have voicemail, it being the era of rotary telephones. What they did have was time, the most valuable resource to a journalist. Neither one of them had much of a social life, so their competitive advantage was that they came into the newsroom on weekends and stayed late in the evenings. I also remind my young charges how Woodward and Bernstein made mistake after mistake. They were swimming in uncharted waters, so the journalism textbooks of the day were no use to them. Luckily for America, they were smart enough to learn from their mistakes. They did have institutional support in the form of top Post editor Ben Bradlee. When the paper was attacked by the White House, it was Bradlee who crafted the Post’s response: “We stand by our story.” All journalists should be so lucky to have that level of confidence from their boss over a prolonged period – keep in mind Nixon didn’t quit until two years after Watergate, when the Republican brain trust on Capitol Hill told him he wouldn’t survive an impeachment conviction vote in the Senate. All the President’s Men belongs in the film canon along with the likes of the Parallax View, Network and Capricorn One. For a country that was so disillusioned, it provided a tonic by showing two regular guys who were determined to get the truth about Watergate out to the masses. Judging by recent events south of the border, it’s a message that is as crucial now as it was then. Other journalism movies I recommend: The Paper, Spotlight, Shattered Glass, Broadcast News, The Killing Fields, The Insider, Citizen Kane, Salvador, Frost/Nixon, Almost Famous, and Anchorman. Would love to hear about your own favourites in the comment box below. 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.
