June 1, 1980…CNN Debuts As The First All News Network
36 years ago today, The Cable New Network went live at 5 PM with anchors Lois Hart and Dave Walker after a brief dedication ceremony from Ted Turner…you can see the first hour here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2m8s&v=rWhgKuKvvPE&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=BrandonMillman
Below are photos from our friend Jeff Jeffares taken in the days leading up to the sign on. Jeff is at the TD position (closest) in the color photo and helped install the Grass Valley 1600 shown here in the box, and the four RCA TK47s. Happy Birthday CNN! -Bobby Ellerbee
How quaint. They called themselves the “news channel” and they actually did news. They had one hour of talk show and while it was on CNN, they still did news for TBS. Now news is gone even from the channel formerly known as Headline News.
When TV news first started, the show ran 15 minutes and they struggled to find enough news to fit that. Of course that was decades before fact was replaced by endless opinion.
The beginning of the end of television journalism.
It’s a shame that all of these news networks have fell away from their original intent. I read that Turner is appalled at how it is now
The book, “CNN: The Inside Story,” is a fascinating account of how CNN came to be and the struggle to survive. It even covers part of the Satellite News Channel story.
News*
Somewhere, I think I may still have my set of CNN bumper stickers. Free to anyone who wrote in and asked
Looks like RCA TK-47 Color Cameras in use.
CNN had studios on the Concourse level of the World Trade Center, where passersby enjoyed seeing the talent.
And I was there in the LA bureau where, 6 days (I believe) into its incarnation, we covered the CA presidential primary (with Gov Reagan running) anchored by Bill Zimmerman at the LA desk and crews going live from Sacramento to San Diego. Frankly, I was surprised we could feed Atlanta from LA given the barely done engineering; going live from across the state just days later took luck, know how and hutspah. I’ll always remember that.
The old switchers look like something out of the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space.
It’s like seeing the baby pictures of a child who entered the world full of promise… only to end up a serial killer. OK, maybe a little bit of a stretch… but not much. “wheeling” the same stories over an hour was the first thing that led to the mess it is today.