CNN At 20: From Chicken Noodle Network To Global Media Power

June 1: It was almost 20 years ago today, and it was as hot as Hotlanta gets when I showed up for my interview at the headquarters of the just-launched Cable News Network next door to the home of Rambling Wrecks of Georgia Tech. There were three flags out front, one from the Republic for which it stands, another from the Peach State complete with Confederate symbols -- since removed -- and the other from the United Nations, signaling the company's international aspirations.

The receptionist was operating like a traffic cop, referring a procession of job applicants to the basement. The building had been remade into the hub of an emerging communications empire so the South could rise again, under the visionary if flamboyant leadership of Ted Turner, the soon to be globally amplified "Mouth from the South." (A few years later, CNN moved to its current home at what some staffers call the "news bunker" in the Omni Hotel complex.

I was living in Boston then, just down for the day to look into a producing opportunity. What I couldn't have guessed was that I would be thrown into putting a primetime news interview show on the air that very night, with little direction and almost no oversight. I had no idea either that I would stay on as a producer for the rest of 1980, often trapped in a basement that had been turned into an electronic Disneyland outfitted with the latest techno-gizmos and an adjacent satellite farm. I had entered the world of the news factory, and, briefly, it entered me.

When CNN went on air (or, actually, on cable) two decades ago, it was an audacious enterprise, scoffed at by the Big Broadcast Boys in New York as the Chicken Noodle Network. For years, the big three networks had gotten by with a half-hour news show a night, and now here was Turner, hyping a news channel. Some of my colleagues in Atlanta saw themselves as "news guerillas," pioneers in a news revolution. Actually, what was happening was simply a transmigration onto TV of the tried-and-true all-news radio format, with its rigorously formatted schedules or news-wheel. Thanks to news veteran Reese Schoenfeld, who sold the idea of "all the news all the time" television to Turner (without getting as much credit or stake as he should), CNN went live that June 1 with a clear plan of how to generate enough programming to fill the time. Schoenfeld became CNN's first president, winning internal recognition, while Ted basked in media glory, startling his staid news execs with this public prediction: "We're gonna go on the air June 1, and we're gonna stay on until the end of the world. When that time comes, we'll cover it, play 'Nearer My God to Thee' and sign off."

CNN was and is primarily about building a business for itself and the cable world, not offering a public service. It supplied the fledging cable business with a marketable product available only to subscribers. Remember, cable started as a way to improve reception, as community antenna systems. To expand and bring in paying customers, the industry needed unique channels and shows. The industry hyped CNN to convince Americans that it was time to pay for the TV that had always been "free" (i.e., advertiser driven and supported). Cable aspired to become a utility on a par with electricity and gas, as indispensable to the home as the TV set itself. So cable became the only place to watch CNN, and CNN in turn helped sell basic cable. Years later cable operators led by TCI's John Malone would buy into the network in a big way, making Turner as rich as he made them.

Now, 20 years later, CNN sees itself as a global "brand." People around the world think of it as America's number one network for news, not always aware of the existence of lookalike ABCNBCBS. CNN went from a fledgling operation to a multi-channel news machine, available in airports, hotel rooms and now on cell phones. As CNN started to go global, people all over the world began to think of CNN as the real Voice of America. CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzeronce revealed that the Pentagon had leaked a story to him rather than hold a press conference, because they knew that when people saw him standing in a suit and tie in front of an American flag they assumed he was a spokesman for government policy.