White House · Data Center · Fortune Technology
Turner’s death comes at a fraught time for cable news, which has struggled to retain viewership in an era
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But that misses an important point: He built it.
Key facts
- They were tuned to CNN, the 24/7 news channel that Ted Turner had launched about five years earlier, which was carrying the launch live
- When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Beth Knobel, a future TV news correspondent, was in graduate school
- The 24/7 schedule of broadcasting continuous developments also vastly reshaped what it was like to work in the TV news industry
- Ted Turner came in and and CNN was seen as an upstart, as something that wasn’t going to succeed
Summary
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Beth Knobel, a future TV news correspondent, was in graduate school. “Shuttle launches were kind of routine and the broadcast networks weren’t even covering them anymore,” says Knobel, who worked for CBS News in the 1990s and now teaches journalism at Fordham University. That, says Knobel, who now teaches a class on TV’s biggest innovators, is one example of why Turner was the biggest of them all, huge steps ahead of anyone else in his understanding of how news needed to be delivered. Turner’s death comes at a fraught time for cable news, which has struggled to retain viewership in an era of countless media choices and abundant streaming video. “We use the word giant sometimes to describe people that aren’t giant,” Knobel says.