In this Deep Cut conversation, we speak with Wendy Walker, who oversaw Larry King Live for nearly two decades and had a front-row seat to some of the most iconic interviews and breaking news coverage that played out during CNN’s rise to prominence. Walker left ABC News in 1980 to join CNN as it was opening its Washington bureau where she worked as a producer for a decade before moving over to Larry King Live.

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In this conversation, Wendy reflects on:

• CNN’s early struggles to earn respect and make its mark on Washington and beyond.

• How live breaking news coverage forever changed the rules of engagement for political coverage.

• What made Larry King such an extraordinary interviewer.

• Signature moments from iconic interviews, from Marlon Brando to Ross Perot.

• CNN’s verification culture and why confirming the facts still set it apart.

• How Larry King paved the way for today’s vast landscape of interview podcasts.

• Why CNN ought to lean into its roots and focus on live coverage as it navigates its path forward.

If you prefer to read, here is a transcript of our interview:

Bill Smee:

Hey everyone, welcome to Breaking the News, Deep Cut Conversations, our interview series that previews our forthcoming documentary podcast, Breaking the News, CNN, and the Birth of Chaos Media. I’m Bill Smee, and I’m joined today by my co-host and series co-producer John Hashimoto.

Our guest today is Wendy Walker, an Emmy winning longtime CNN executive who ran the network’s iconic Larry King Live show for nearly two decades. Wendy began her CNN career in the early 1980s.

As the network’s Washington Bureau was first opening, and she had a firsthand view of CNN’s rise and the challenges it faced and overcame along the way, Wendy, welcome and thank you so much for joining us.

Wendy Walker:

Thank you for having me.

Bill Smee:

So we wanted to start, as I mentioned, your start at CNN was back in the nineteen eighties, it was quite an extraordinary moment because CNN was in the startup mode. And I wonder if you could just give us a sense first for sort of what that was like atmospherically.

Wendy Walker:

Well, I think we’d have to go back to how I got there. And I was my I I had an entry level job at ABC News in Washington. I was a secretary, and my roommate was was Katie Couric And we started at ABC in nineteen seventy-nine on the same day. And so we became friends and shared skirts and we had no money. We were really, really broke.

So she was, she actually had a better job because she could run around and meet everybody and I had to sit, you know, in in the corporate room by George Watson, the bureau chief. But it was it was really an education and we would come in on the weekends and learn. We’d just go log tapes or do whatever we could to to to learn the business.

George Watson was a you know was an this typical newsman that you’d think of at those times, you know, the long lunches, coming back, watching the show. And he called me in his office one day and he said, I’m leaving, and I’m gonna start this new network with this guy named Ted Turner. I’m sure you haven’t heard of him. He’s a sailor, he’s an ad guy, he lives in Atlanta, and he wants to start a twenty-four hour network.

And I’m gonna go and I’m gonna start the bureau here. And I’d like you to come and I’m bringing Bernie Shaw with me. And Bernie is gonna anchor. But I need the young blood. I need you, and I’ve seen you come in on the weekends. And so, you know, if you come and help me get this thing started, then I will, you know, make you a producer faster than you would if you stayed here.

And I, you know, it was so hard to get a job at ABC News. I thought, my God, what am I doing? I’m really gonna leave after I was able to get this job?

And he said, but I need some more young people. And I said, well my friend Katie Couric wants to write. And he said, okay, you can bring her along too. So we went to CNN together and we were making, I I mean by the time I would pay my rent and my car… we were, you know, we just would hope we get a date once in a while so we could eat. Because it was really, we were really, really broke.

But so it was it was very fast. I mean, we got there and it was just think of creating a news bureau. I mean, we had to we had to get Rolodexes, we had to get calls and you know, get press releases to tell everybody that we were here. And the funny little little fun fact was that you couldn’t see us in Washington. So it was even harder to say, yeah, we’re, you know, we’re with Cable News Network and yes, you can’t see us, but we’re here and we’d like you to, you know, be on the show. So so that was the beginning.

And then he also had an edict that we couldn’t use styrofoam cups. So I brought my coffee cups from college. I had six cups. So if you were really lucky if you got there early you got one of Wendy’s cups and then you know you could have a cup of coffee. And there was a sign on the men’s room saying, “No newspapers in here.” And then they also rationed toilet paper. There was a certain amount you were allowed to use every single time.

Nobody and nobody was telling us what to do. We just had been at a network and most everybody else had been at a network. So we all kind of just thought we’re playing house, we’re playing Lego land and building this thing and not having much of a a direction.

And then once we got the bureau situated, it was on Wisconsin Avenue and it was, you know, we all had our desks and everything. And Ted came to visit and he said, “Well, I bet you wanna know why there’s so many women, y’all are so many women? Well, it’s because I don’t have to pay as much.”

And you know, back then this was, this was, you know, there are a lot of rules that were way, way different than about guys, you know, lots of stuff. I didn’t know enough to have that even bother me because I was just so grateful that, Okay, you don’t have to pay me as much, but I’m gonna be the first one here in the morning and the last one to leave and I’m gonna work harder than anybody else and I’m gonna, I’ve got my foot in the door and I’m gonna do something with it.

John Hashimoto:

Other than the coffee cups, what were the serious journalistic or production challenges you faced when you first got there? You mentioned briefly, nobody knew who we were, number one, because we weren’t even televised in that local network or Washington network. What were some of the serious challenges you faced?

Wendy Walker:

This is interesting, but you know, just think about this. They had to throw people together really quickly. I mean that you know, and and and not just a few people, I mean bureau after bureau after bureau. So you would find that some of the people were really bright. But then some of the other people would come from other news organizations that weren’t. So there was this hodgepodge with us, you know, there was some real unimpressive people that were in high positions. And then there were the then there were some low people that were, you know, that were in low positions that were brilliant. And so it took, so that was the hard part is sometimes you’d have to when we were so young and we were starving for learning how to do all of this, sometimes the people that were teaching us were just you know… so the the that was just kind of that was to me very difficult to to have to deal with some person who was telling you something that you knew was stupid.

John Hashimoto:

I assume by the way in DC, a lot of key players on the Hill didn’t take you very seriously at the beginning as well. So did you have struggles to get people to do interviews, get people to take calls?

Wendy Walker:

We were at the convention in Detroit, I mean all the everybody else had these big convention things, you know, ABC News, CBS, NBC and and we had like seats, seats on the floor, no glass, no nothing.

So the first job that I had, a producer of the the weekend shows, like the Meet the Press the you know news shows. They were called Newsmaker Saturday, Newsmaker Sunday, Press Box. And it was with Rollie Evans and Bob Novak and Pat Buchanan and Steve Ratner and I mean it was some pretty good people. But I used to keep a list of all the people we invited just to because if somebody said why did you end up with the Deputy Postmaster General on your show, I could say, well, I asked Ed Meese and I asked Don Regan and I asked Jim Brady and I asked, you know. So yeah, it was ridiculous. It was, it was just that everybody thought, I mean, chicken noodle news, nobody took it seriously.

Bill Smee:

Well, it’s interesting and it that leads to my next question, which is as you were describing chicken noodle news and and the lack of respect, it seems that as the eighties wore on, CNN really was making its mark. And I’m just curious, as you guys started to make that progress, what was the reaction?

Wendy Walker:

So I had one of the jobs that a producer has is they have to go make sure that this if they’re doing a stand-up that you know everything’s ready for the you know the crews are out there and the audio’s working and everything. And the the cameramen from the other networks were so mean to me. And they would make fun of me, you know, this like dumb, you know, young blonde girl that’s invading and try and making room for, you know, for her correspondents.

And I remember one day I started to cry. And Lesley Stahl took me by the arm and she said, “Come with me.” And she took me into the coffee room and closed the door and she said, “Don’t you ever let them see you cry.” And I, you know, so the women were nice.

But I was there at the White House when, you know, all of a sudden we, you know, we were able to get the White, CNN in the White House. And that’s really when things started changing because then they could see they could see wars, they could see Gorbachev, they could see the Hill, they could see what we were covering and people were looking up and the that monitor was there. And then when we started traveling, I said to Marlon Fitzwater, you know, we’d really like to make sure that that when the president travels that we put CNN in the embassy so he can see it.

So that’s when, it’s when… in the international group is so impressive as you as you know. Just and they were and they are now amazing and they were amazing then. And so just the immediacy of seeing this stuff. You know, before, you know, you’d have to get the tape and get on a motorcycle and run it somewhere and put it up, you know, feed it and and then you’d see you know, whatever was going on. Well now we were we were Live. So the Live, it was Live, Live, Live, Live. Live was what what made, you know, us important.

John Hashimoto:

You moved over to Larry King Live in the 90s, Wendy. And of course, as you just mentioned, CNN was, if it was known, it was known for Live, not appointment viewing, if you will, right? Which Larry King Live became for sure. So how did that kind of affect the CNN brand, you think?

Wendy Walker:

Well, Larry was on the air for twenty-five years. I did eighteen of them. So he was on for seven years before I got there. But it was interesting. you know, he was an exception. Larry literally was an exception. I mean we tried for a long time, you know, for years. my the executives would come to me and say, you know, we have to think about the next one, the next Larry. And and really there there wasn’t any anybody like him. I mean, he was such a really interesting, very strange, quirky, and…

And some of the things that I loved that they would say about him, like, well, he doesn’t read the book, or you know, and that was the funniest thing because yeah, he didn’t he sometimes, he didn’t read most of the time, he didn’t read the book because he didn’t want to know what was, what was in the book, so he would because he had no attention span. And so if he knew what was in the book, he wouldn’t ask it because he already knew it. And that was probably the big hardest part being a his producer.

I’ll give you an example. During OJ, we got this, we were told that that F. Lee Bailey had decided to join the team the dream team and so and Larry was walking in, you know into the bureau. But so I said I said, Larry, Larry, do you do you have Lee Bailey’s number? We don’t have him and I wanna try to see if he’ll do a beeper or see if I can get him to an affiliate so he he can come on tonight because he’s you know, he’s he’s joining the team. And so he didn’t have, he didn’t have the number, so he called he called information. And said, Hi, Larry King. Hey, help me out. And he’s and he just asked this operator. And he said, you know, I need Lee Bailey’s number in in Florida. And so this woman gave, this operator gave us the number because it was unlisted. And so so he called Lee and he said, you know, will you do the show tonight? And he said, Yes. And he’s and Lee said, And I had him on speaker and Lee said, Let me, let me, let me tell you why I’m doing it. And Larry, like a little child, went, No, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it. Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I don’t, I don’t wanna hear it. And as he got off the phone, I said, Okay, why did you do that? And he said, Because I won’t wanna ask it.

His genius was also was if somebody was guest hosting and they asked, you know, you know, give me something, tell me what how to do this, Larry. And Larry would always say, keep your questions short, and and listen. And those are the two things he said. And it was so true because he would keep his questions so short. And if you now that I’ve said that, just listen to other people talk. There the questions are, you know, a minute and a half going, they give you a history lesson, and they do this. Larry was like, What happened? Why? What’s next? You know, and it was, you know, and that’s how he made news. And he made, he made a lot of news.

Bill Smee:

Are there I’m curious, you mentioned the F. Lee Bailey anecdote , and you added, as you mentioned, a great long run. I’m sure you have hundreds of stories and anecdotes, but are there any others that come to mind that sort of stand out? Like if you’re at a dinner party and you say, “This was a wild one, this guest or or some craziness.”

Wendy Walker:

I guess the the best one was Marlon Brando. And Marlon Brando had a there was a book coming out, a tell all book, just a book that he did not approve of about it himself. So he decided to write a his own book. And his publishers and he said, I’m not doing anything. He was totally reclusive. Nobody had seen him in LA for years. He lived on Mulholland Drive, I think. And he was just not to be seen.

But I got a call. They said, you know, Wendy Walker, Marlon Brando’s on the phone. So I thought it was Katie trying to be funny because she would always play that joke on me to say that Colin Powell was calling me and I’d think I got a good interview and she’d laugh at me. So I thought it was a joke. So I pick up the phone and I said, hi Marlon. And he said, Is this is this the person I need to talk to about going on Larry’s show? And the more I realized it, the more I realized that it was actually Marlon Brando. And he said, I’d like, I’d like, I think I have to do your show, but I’d like to meet Larry. I’d like to see him. I can I can pick him up in a half hour. And we were at the Wilshire and I went to Larry and I said, I I think this is real, but you know, Marlon Brando says he’s gonna come pick you up in a few minutes. So we go downstairs to the you know the the alcove at the Wilshire, and sure enough, he drives up with barefoot, and shorts on, drink in his hand, in a convert in a convertible. And they get, he gets, they get in the car and they embrace. And so they drive away.

And I’m just waiting like a mother, you know, when is he gonna kinda come back. Is he gonna be okay? So they came back and Larry said, We’re doing the show, but he wants to do it at his house in two days. So okay, two days Live, Marlon Brando at his house. So we got, you know, got hustling and we we did it.

And so he was we were all there, all set up, everything was all set up. Finally he walks out and he walks out with a coffee cup with no coffee. I don’t know it was not coffee, and his shorts in his in his feet. And so I was in the on in the control in a control truck in the driveway and Larry was, they were having at it, was a really fascinating talk I mean, really fascinating because we hadn’t seen the guy, you know? And he was saying some really interesting things, how he didn’t really like acting, he just did it for the money. So when he’d run out of money he’d get, he’d get a gig and then of course he’d get you know, an Academy Award or…

And then I called my boss, Tom Johnson, and I said, Can I go another half hour? ‘Cause this is incredible. Can we do that? And can I go, you know, for another and he said, Yes, you can. So we went for ninety minutes and at the very end they start singing a song. And they then they start putting their arm around each other and then they look at each other and they kissed on the lips. And I thought, whoa, television moment. I mean, this is gonna be everywhere. All of a sudden the phone rings and it’s Tom Johnson and he said, Why did you let them do that? And I said, What? What do you mean? He said, Why did you let them kiss on the lips? And I said, Well, when I was telling Larry, you know, briefing him before the show, and I I did say, you know, if you get really enamored with this guy, try to try please try not to kiss him on the lips. I thought, you know, what do you mean?

So afterwards we came out, you know, and they became friends after that. And Larry said, what about that kiss? And he said and he said, “Kiss my producer like you kissed me.” And my husband, I was married at the time. My husband was like leaning over me and and Marlon Brando was kissing me on the lips.

John Hashimoto:

Let’s turn to one of those other television moments, The Ross Perot interview, I think, in ‘92, and one of the most memorable shows of that moment, right? And launched Perot’s run for the White House, right? Yet, it was also criticized in some quarters as being kind of a soft, peddled interview, right? Something that Larry had to contend with most, you know, for a lot of years, right? That Larry wasn’t prepped, Larry was no Mike Wallace, Larry wasn’t a hardcore journalist. Do you think that was fair, that criticism of Larry?

Wendy Walker:

One of the things about Larry was that it would, if I had said to Larry when we were briefing, I know how you can get this guy, he would be really angry. He never he never he was not a gotcha guy, and that was his personality. And I I love that when they say that about, you know, some of the harder guys because, you know, Larry Larry produced news— like the PR person every every week would send down to Atlanta a you know a pile of paper that long. I mean we made, Oprah had somebody watching our show every night to see who we were doing and she would copy us. I mean, he was a totally different person. I mean if that had been some other person, it just so happened it was Larry’s ingredients of an entertainer and a news person smashed into this strange thing that there was nothing else like him.

Bill Smee:

Well, it’s interesting. I mean, as you say, he was that was his brand and and he got a lot out of guests. so…

Wendy Walker:

He did. He got a lot out of guests. But with the Perot thing, that was a very interesting night. I think he never, I never felt that that was a soft interview, that one in particular. We, it became an international story. We became part of the story. And when you become part of the story, as you know, that’s really difficult because it just changes everything and you can’t contain, you have to worry about other things.

Bill Smee:

Well, let’s let’s zoom out a little on King, the franchise as it evolved, moving off of shows to you know, competition came along in the form of first Fox and then MSNBC and of course the internet and you were there through the years. And I’m curious to know whether how you think that affected things and how you, you know, running the the franchise had to adjust.

Wendy Walker:

Well, yeah, it was. And plus we had huge, Larry had never really had… in his life, he really hadn’t ever had competition because he was on, did this amazing radio show and then he had this kind of niche. But then all of a sudden, you know, getting the big get, whether it was whether it was, you know, the you know, Bobbit, the guy who had had his penis cut off— for the “fifteen minute of fame” people, or Martha Stewart when she went into jail, Paris Hilton when she got out of jail, O J Simpson, I mean I mean, if there was a big interview to get, it was Larry, Oprah, Katie, Matt, Diane, Barbara, And those were all the people that we had to I mean, we really had to had to deal with and it was vicious.

I mean, I’ve always wanted to do something with it because it it was really, really vicious. I remember we got the first interview with the the doctor who had had done the surgery on Kanye West’s mother who, and she died from the liposuction operation. And we had to, and when so when it was somebody like that that wasn’t used to, you know, being asked to be on the show— like a like an Al Gore or something like that— it was you had to handle it totally differently because you had to keep them away from all the other people because even though they said that they wouldn’t do something for them or give them something, so many times they did. They’d say things like, you know, we’ll rent you a car and we don’t care if we ever see it again. And so will you do the show? Or, you know, you’ve got some kids. We’ve got these tickets, you know, for the Disneyland— how maybe they’d like to go. We couldn’t do anything like that.

And if it was a big interview and a big enough person like Martha Stewart, they would actually have, you know, their PR machine. And I had to go to New York to talk to her about the interviews, you know, going into jail, coming out of jail, and they would meet with everybody to talk about it. And, you know, we couldn’t do ground rules. We were, we were a news network. I could not do ground rules. The other ones, some of them would say, well, with their entertainment, so they’re they can be a little more lenient, but we couldn’t. So they would say, Well, we really don’t wanna talk about, you know, this, whatever. And I’d say, you don’t have to, but we have to ask. We have to have the ability to ask. We might ask. It’s up to you to to decide what you want to say.

John Hashimoto:

The media atmosphere has changed a lot here in the last decade or so, right? The kind of interview show that Larry King and you famously put on. You almost can’t find it on cable, obviously. What’s happened, right, in replacing it has been the Hannity, Rachel Maddow, mostly politically oriented, somewhat partisan in most cases conversation, if you want to call conversation, oftentimes rage-based conversation. Why do think that’s changed so much? Why isn’t there space for the kind of interview show that Larry King was famous for?

Wendy Walker:

Because there’s too much news. There wasn’t that much news before. I mean, if I think about it all the time, like ‘cause I watch, I have television in every room and usually they’re all on. And I think I mean, I would not be able to do the entertainment part of what I did unless it was somebody gigantic. I mean, you know, Mick Jagger was huge. That was a hard really hard guest, you know, Princess Kate. I mean, it would have to be really, really big and I’d probably have to do it on the weekend. Because you never know what’s gonna happen. And so, that’s why these guys are putting on what people want to see. And might be a little different slant whether if you’re going CNN ,MSNBC or Fox. There are three different kinds of ways to approach it. But it’s just because I mean, if we were doing this, I would be doing the news. And it would be hard. Big the big question would be, what do we not do tonight? I mean, because there’s so many different so many things that happen all day. Which one do you leave out? Because you can’t do it all. And I think if I was lucky, maybe I could do something lighter on the weekends. Cause we were a seven day a week show. So if I could hopefully maybe tape some amazing, you know, one but they would have to be very high end, very exclusive to get to do something other than news right now.

Bill Smee:

Interestingly you mentioned that’s the the barrier on television, though in some ways Larry’s show and what you guys presided over, we now see are podcasts, right? Podcast hosts who will do one on one interviews. And I’m wondering, do you think that’s sort of part of Larry’s legacy is the world of podcasting now many of them are kind of th one on one interviews, often for an hour?

Wendy Walker:

Yeah, I had his mic, his microphones in my office. Which is, you know, kind of… so if I ever did a podcast I’d bring it along with me. Yeah, no, I think that he was a teacher. He was brilliant at what he did. It was nobody, nobody better. And you know, we had a very good relationship. However, you know, I was way more of a, you know, I would say, okay, here’s here’s what we have on tonight and I would try to the hardest thing to do with Larry was to brief him. He didn’t want to be briefed. I’ve been doing this for a hundred years, or you don’t, I don’t need to hear what you what do you have to say. But you know, or I’d say, Guess what? We’ve got President Obama. Well, we did him last year. Because that’s how, because that just shows you his interest and like he just got it have to be then then afterwards he’d say, that was great. That was great. But yeah, I think that the podcast is definitely I would give him some kudos for that.

But a little secret about Larry, he loved breaking news and he was really good at it. I mean, he was super good at it. The day that Michael Jackson died, I had a show booked. And then I got a call and Farrah Fawcett had died. So we canceled, we canceled all day long. I mean I canceled I just because we had something on if there was something better during the day, I would s keep looking the whole day to top it. And so people always, they got canceled. So anyway, we booked, we finally booked a the Farrah Fawcett show. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon. We had four hours to put it together and you know, it was really sad and then we had really, really, good guests. And then all of a sudden I got a call from somebody in LA and they said something’s going on with Michael Jackson. Apparently he’s been taken to the hospital and it’s not good. And so I started checking it out and I called Mark Geragos, the defense attorney, and I asked him if he could look into it. And then then I got a, somebody sent me a picture of him dead on a gurney, asking me to pay seventy-five thousand dollars for it. Of course I wouldn’t do that. But so he was dead. So what do you do? You have Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett dead. So I kept doing both of them, you know, booking both of them. And then it got to the point where like, no, it’s just Michael. I mean we knew that unfortunately poor Farrah was gonna pass.

And Michael was an international story. And so we were doing it Live. I mean, Larry got on the set. We had we had some guests, but they just kept calling in and calling in and calling in. And we we were on over, I think two and a half hours or something. We said, Yeah, we can keep going. Because everybody was just that’s where they wanted to be. ‘Cause that’s the other thing. When you wanted to say something, when you wanted to tell something, you wanted to tell Larry. And it really wasn’t because he was a nice guy. It was because he listened, like he said. He listened. And and I think that was the secret of his success.

John Hashimoto:

Wendy, the business model of journalism is at risk, I think we can all say, driven in large part by technology and audience fragmentation. In your view, what does CNN now have to do to be successful as a business?

Wendy Walker:

I think they need to do even more Live. I mean I wouldn’t have a piece of tape on that shouldn’t in that work for anything. They are doing some some things on tape that just I mean you you’re going to this amazing overwhelming, you know, incredible stories that we’re dealing with. And then then they break for a for a documentary. Kind of a light documentary. I mean, they have the the most amazing war correspondents I’ve ever seen that they have right now. And I wouldn’t, I would just, if I was in charge, I would take all the the the documentaries about travel and even though they’re lovely, they’re lovely. They’re not, they’re not gripping, and CNN should go back to what made them famous, what made us, what got us on for people to actually recognize us and respect us was Live. You know, just keep it going, keep it going. I mean, there’s a plethora of news. I’ve never seen, I never had that. I literally would be sitting around once in a while at three o’clock in the afternoon with my staff saying, come on, we gotta think of something. I mean, there were, it was that bad I mean, that’s what it used to be like. We forget, you know, we forget what a debate looked like between, you know, John McCain and Barack Obama, when they were nice to each other and, you know, treated two people with integrity, treating you know, each other with respect. I mean, that doesn’t sell. So I would just

Bill Smee:

Right.

Wendy Walker:

I would say Live. If it were me, I’d put Live signs all over the all over the the place.

Bill Smee:

Well, I think that’s a great place to wind this down. it’s interesting to have you close with that thought that Live is paramount. I mean Larry King Live, obviously, where you made your biggest mark, but it’s it’s just interesting at this moment in time you come back to CNN’s roots. So thank you for all the and for the insights.

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Artley was editor-in-chief and senior vice president of CNN Digital from 2009 to 2022, overseeing the editorial operation as it became one of the world’s leading digital news providers. Currently President and CEO of Hawaiʻi Public Radio, Artley arrived at CNN after serving in senior digital roles at The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune.

Kalita was a senior vice president at CNN Digital from 2016 to 2020, overseeing national news, breaking news, programming, opinion, and features. She is co-founder and CEO of URL Media, a network of Black- and Brown-owned media organizations, and founder and publisher of Epicenter-NYC, a community journalism platform based in Queens. She formerly worked at the Los Angeles Times, Quartz, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

In this conversation, Meredith and Mitra reflect on:

• CNN Digital as CNN’s second disruption, a startup-like newsroom inside the broadcast mothership.

• The early promise of social platforms and what CNN misunderstood about their values.

• Why breaking news still mattered as CNN’s core strength and global trust signal.

• How audience data shaped coverage, sometimes moving digital stories onto television.

• CNN’s verification culture and why confirming the facts still set it apart.

• The danger of chasing shiny objects instead of investing more deeply in CNN’s core.

• CNN’s neutral voice, less shareable but still valuable as a public utility.

• AI as the next disruption threatening attribution, provenance, and trust.

• What CNN must protect for its future, including owned technology, breaking news, and global reporting.

If you prefer to read, here is a transcript of our interview:

John Hashimoto: Hi everyone, and welcome to Breaking the News: Deep Cut Conversations, our interview series previewing the forthcoming documentary podcast Breaking the News: CNN and the Birth of Chaos Media. I’m John Hashimoto, joined by my co-host and series co-producer Bill Smee.

Today we’re talking with Meredith Artley and S. Mitra Kalita, two journalists and media executives who helped lead CNN Digital through one of the most consequential transitions in modern news: the shift from desktop to mobile, from homepage to social feed, from CNN as the place people went for breaking news to a world where news was suddenly everywhere, all the time.

Meredith and Mitra, welcome, and thank you for joining us.

Meredith Artley: Aloha, John. Great to see you.

John Hashimoto: Great to see you too. Mitra?

S. Mitra Kalita: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

John Hashimoto: I’m going to start with the “you’re too young to remember” question. CNN was originally the great disruptor of broadcast news. By the time you were helping lead CNN Digital, did it feel like digital had become CNN’s second act of disruption — almost a startup inside the mothership? Mitra?

S. Mitra Kalita: I’m not too young to remember that. I feel like I have good genes, so thank you.

I think of CNN as my entry to journalism. You can’t divorce CNN from the news. I was a child when CNN was created, that’s true. But I also feel like that’s important because I grew up against the backdrop of CNN being the news, and a new way of doing the news. In the same way that my kids will not remember life without a mobile phone, I would say my life is defined by having a concept of CNN as the news.

For me, the great disruptor was when Meredith called me with an offer at CNN.

Meredith Artley: No.

S. Mitra Kalita: First of all, it was a brand that my whole family worldwide had heard of. Even though I was the managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, my family in India does not read the Los Angeles Times. That’s not known to them.

So this idea of CNN being the news, being a brand that everyone knows globally — and my own background, which is a mix of global and local and digital and looking around the corner to be part of whatever the next thing is in journalism — that’s how I see the last 30 years I’ve spent in media.

By the time I got to CNN, it didn’t feel as much like a second act as much as there was so much that digital could lean on in CNN’s roots: the essence of CNN and its mission, this idea of always being on and being known and being in the conversation. And by the way, being in people’s living rooms, which is what defines digital: accessibility and intimacy.

So for me, getting to CNN and being told, “You’re going to help as part of this digital transition” — and Meredith can tell you how she wooed a lot of talent in that time period and the language used — I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, do you guys know what you have that’s so akin to the modern internet and the way people actually want to consume journalism?”

John Hashimoto: Meredith, obviously, when the team launched — and let’s give credit to Scott Woelfel, who launched CNN.com back in the day — were you kind of the second-wave revolutionary in your mind? What was your take on digital and CNN writ large?

Meredith Artley: I like your framework, John, about CNN Digital and everything we were doing digitally at the time being a second wave of disruption. I think that’s true.

I joined in 2009, so that’s a really interesting time. To your point, there was a team of people before I joined, and CNN was already strong and getting a lot of audience digitally, especially CNN.com. Scott and the team built that up, and it’s great. In all of these jobs that we all have, so often you get credit, but you have to give credit to the people who came before you who built a strong foundation. If you’re lucky, you get to keep building on that. That’s what we got to do.

It’s 2009. Social media is ascendant, and at that moment, they’re the good guys. They’re fascinating. At that moment, we thought they shared our values because they said they did. We thought their technology was amazing. They were getting all these people on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and all these interesting things were happening. You wanted to be part of that.

So we were talking about partnerships. We were talking about ways we could extend CNN digitally beyond the walls that we had — the owned-and-operated properties. That was a big part of what we were doing early on: expanding.

The other thing we were doing was something I called, at the time, a Pilates strategy. I don’t know if anyone knew what I was talking about — and I don’t do Pilates — but the idea was: strengthen your core and stretch into new areas.

So we were trying to double down on breaking news digitally and innovate there. And then we were also trying to do new things in new areas and new beats. We were doing things around food and entertainment and religion and starting to dive into things beyond breaking news. That was exciting. And as social was ascendant, we were playing in that arena too. It was an amazing moment.

We were separate early on in my time, in 2009 and 2010. We weren’t integrated. That was another thing that aided the disruption, if you will. Physically in Atlanta, back when Atlanta was very clearly still the headquarters of CNN, we were in a separate part of the building, behind the Starbucks, on the ground floor. We weren’t in the towers.

There was a whole ecosystem there because we were separated, and that allowed us to innovate a little bit faster and do things that were a little different and not necessarily follow directly in the path of what was happening on the linear air. There were great relationships, and integration was a big part of what I did there — bringing us closer to the rest of the organization. But in the beginning, we were still kind of separate. I think that helps when you feel like you’re a little smaller.

Bill Smee: Interesting. You’re leading into what was going to be one of my questions. As you did engineer more of a coming together — and all legacy media organizations face this — there’s maybe a little bit of a culture clash. For both of you, what was the hardest part as you moved the two sides together, digital and the broadcast side? What were your biggest challenges, and what lessons emerged?

S. Mitra Kalita: I think one is just the medium itself. There are aspects of breaking news that lent themselves really well to digital. I really tried to lean into this idea of iterative journalism. Wolf Blitzer will tell you what we know, but importantly, he also tells you what we don’t know. For a lot of newspapers that were making the transition to digital, that was a much newer phenomenon in journalism.

Because Meredith had a few years on me — I got there in 2016 — I felt like I leaned into what was working.

That being said, the type of video content creation that was happening on the internet, if you think about BuzzFeed and NowThis, was a very casual approach to the viewer. You’re talking to them, even with them. The way that an anchor at CNN talks — which is now the subject of so many memes — is a really hard thing to break. There was a part of me that thought, “We just shouldn’t try to break that.” CNN as a brand is authority. We’re not going to be BuzzFeed or NowThis.

Over the last few years, since I’ve been gone, I’ve seen CNN find almost a third lane — the voice of Anderson Cooper talking about grief, for example. It’s Anderson Cooper, but the subject matter clearly lends itself to a certain tone that works digitally.

One finding was that translating broadcast news talent to digital felt like a transition.

The other was, when I talk about iterative journalism, what Meredith is describing in terms of integrating — we had 4,000 journalists to get the memo around to. It was not just the digital team. The nature of news gathering at CNN relies on the reason it’s so good: it’s an army. The reason it’s so hard is because it’s an army.

As a manager, how do you quickly communicate change? My CNN years felt like an MBA in change management because of that.

Meredith Artley: That’s great.

S. Mitra Kalita: I just want to give you grace on one thing, which is that we had belief in the platforms. And there was also a desire to meet audiences where they are.

There was something remarkable about CNN, which was largely a gated cable news product. Unless you subscribed to cable, there was still one barrier to get there. So I do think it was revolutionary, even in a time of subscriptions and the Wall Street Journal model, The New York Times model, and a lot of aggregators. CNN was one place on the internet that was creating access to journalism and meeting people in all the places they were.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg set up a website to rank hot women at Harvard, and we believed he was in the business of democracy, just like we were in the business of democracy.

I agree with Meredith’s regret, but I also give us a little bit of grace because the reality in many markets was that Facebook was the internet. Unless CNN was willing to participate on Facebook, we would not have access to certain key markets.

John Hashimoto: You mentioned breaking news, Meredith. Our series has this conceit of the two-sided coin of breaking news: super important, revolutionary, but also part of the chaotic environment of notifications all the time that we now live in. In the digital era, did breaking news also become a traffic crutch — something the organization leaned on because it reliably produced clicks, alerts, audience spikes, and urgency?

Meredith Artley: I don’t. I think we treated breaking news differently digitally, by nature of the platform and by nature of us making our own decisions about what was going to be best for the digital audiences.

I don’t think it became a crutch. I think we largely did right by breaking news. For people who wanted that from us, we delivered it, and we delivered it in new ways over the course of our time there.

I understand the criticism. I understand where it comes from. I certainly understand it on air. We were having those conversations all the time about using the breaking-news banner too much, again and again. Digital is a different experience. Something can be breaking and developing, and we’re going to leave the banner up on our app and all of our sites and everywhere we are on social, and let people know there’s something breaking and developing and we’re on it and here for you.

So I think we handled that pretty well. There might have been a couple of things we could have done better, but I don’t know, Mitra.

S. Mitra Kalita: I think you’re right. The areas I’m proudest of — and Meredith referenced this — include the live blog. We started a product called Live Story.

A really good example of digital driving innovation for the overall brand would be that we would go live from, let’s say, a hostage situation in Philadelphia. TV is largely on the latest thing in the Trump administration, because my five years at CNN were squarely the Trump campaign and his presidency. Suddenly, on our live blog, we have 30,000 or 40,000 concurrent users, meaning it’s spiking. There’s interest in this.

I could very easily — and I did — go to Jeff Zucker and say, “Jeff, our story on Trump is getting, I don’t know, 5,000 concurrents. Philadelphia has a hostage situation going on.” And he would, to his credit, call the control room and say, “Let’s go to Philadelphia. Digital is saying there’s a lot of interest.”

That connection feels like a really important legacy for both Meredith and me, in how digital can lead the way on what the news agenda is, and how sometimes it’s okay for your audience to guide you on their interests.

We had an amazing barometer by being the largest news site on the planet. We talk about data insights and all the ways we try to get to know our audience, which we definitely lacked in some cases. But our audience, in terms of telling us what they wanted to hear more of, felt like a daily conversation.

I know, John, there’s a feeling around breaking news. But we were also able to highlight certain stories that otherwise wouldn’t have been considered breaking news — local stories, stories situated in certain communities. I wish in hindsight we had done more of that, and maybe done it a little earlier.

One aspect people respond to in breaking news is a live stream of a rally or a candidate stumping, and that definition of news. I think there has been a lot of reckoning with CNN’s role in that. But the second thing I’m talking about is that audiences have interest in news besides politics, and we had a barometer on that. I think we tried to use it. I think we could have used it a little bit more.

Bill Smee: An adjacent question, in the breaking-news world — and this is not limited to digital — is about high-profile breaking-news stories. When the Boston Marathon bombing happened, or the famous Balloon Boy incident that everyone likes to talk about, everyone is scrambling. It’s not just the newsroom or the digital newsroom. Now you’re getting competition from Vice and others. How did that change or amp up the pressure inside CNN as you made coverage decisions, especially when information was coming fast and furious from the field?

Meredith Artley: We had a lot of conversations, and this is where the organization would always come together so brilliantly as a whole. The barriers would break down between the digital team, news gathering, programming, national, international — and horrible news aside, it was magical to see that teamwork unfold in moments of breaking news.

You could see it in Atlanta, where I was, or New York, where Mitra was. People would physically huddle and get together and listen. Who’s the lead? Who are they on the phone with? What are we taking? What are we doing?

It was how trusted journalism should work in moments where something has just happened.

Did we get some things wrong? Of course. Every news organization has. That’s humans dealing with uncertainty. I think we did a pretty good job, in an organization of almost 4,000 people, trying to remind ourselves — and there are a lot of Type A personalities at CNN, Lord knows — that we needed to slow down in these moments.

It’s better to be right than to be first.

Of course, there were moments of stress where somebody would say, “I got this alert from The New York Times two minutes earlier than I got the CNN alert. What’s going on?” And it’s like, let’s calm down. Let’s really think about what matters to the audience.

Those moments were really great. How that breaking news manifested itself over all of CNN’s platforms — on air and on all the digital platforms — is a different matter. But how we came together in those moments and shared information was really powerful.

John Hashimoto: Did CNN, during your era — because they’re in a different era now — ever fully come to terms with the fact that it was no longer just competing with NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, Fox, and The New York Times, but with platforms, creators, witnesses, algorithms, and the audience itself? When did it start to recognize that the landscape was shifting and that the institutional news provider it had been was not going to last in quite the same way?

S. Mitra Kalita: I think there is something inherently different about CNN than creators. I work with creators a lot now in my company. I see them as partners. We take some cues from them. We will assign them to stories. I could not see CNN doing that.

The one thing that surprised me most when I got to CNN is what it takes for CNN to confirm something is indeed news. That process of: Did this actually happen? It’s not hearsay. It’s not the Associated Press’s reporting. It’s not, “There’s a viral video, let’s aggregate that,” as many digital players did in our time.

It was literally: Let us confirm this news. Do we know this to be true? How do we know this to be true?

It’s so captain-basic in journalism, but if you ask me what the biggest surprise of my time at CNN was, it’s actually that. I didn’t know that when CNN confirms a news story, it really confirms a news story.

There’s a part of your question where I think the brand set itself up differently from the participation on the internet that you’re describing. Meredith had set up a social video team that was vetting information. The number of times that team would find everyone reporting something, but actually the real story was more nuanced, flat out not true, or the person they were writing about was never contacted — it was a pretty high number.

So I think there’s a place for a CNN in a world of misinformation and a lot of what you’re saying, John, including the question of who gets to be a journalist.

I’m not dictating what CNN should do. It’s not the model I practice today. It’s much more participatory, much more community-driven. But there’s something about that model that I respect we hung on to for as long as we did. That’s a little bit of hindsight, because in the moment you want to be as cool as everyone else.

I don’t know, Meredith, if that resonates with you.

Meredith Artley: I think it does. You’re making me think of a couple of things.

One is going back to social for a little bit. We slowly saw that these were folks who actually didn’t share our values and were fine letting lies and hate spread — and yet we still felt the need to be with them and be on their platforms. Trying to hold space for those things is something everyone is still doing now.

The other thing is the ways that we didn’t go far enough — and I think most of these folks would agree with me — in building our own tech that was ethical and innovative. We had some great developers and engineers and all of that. But I think about that, and I wish that for CNN going forward.

S. Mitra Kalita: It’s just not what the internet was, though. I’m thinking about iReport, which was actually a pretty cool tool. It’s amazing. But if iReport had stuck around, users were on the platforms you’re describing. Even if you hung on to your technology, these platforms had outsized control of the internet.

Meredith Artley: They have outsized control over the internet and still do, even though there are some signs that’s declining.

The thing that’s exciting about the future for CNN — and also, Mitra, for you and for me in the roles we have now running local, community-centric organizations — is that we’re both presidents and CEOs of local organizations, which is really interesting. We’re not the only ones from that time who have now shifted more to be local and community-focused. I think that’s interesting too, but maybe a separate rabbit hole.

I think there’s a huge opportunity for CNN as slop continues to slurp around the internet, and as people don’t know the provenance of something, and as polarization and isolation continue, fueled in such large part by existing social media platforms.

Trusted brands matter more than they ever have. More than they ever have.

It’s not about, “Do you guys get the creator economy and how cool are you?” It’s, “How accurate are you, and how much do I trust you?” There are a lot of people who still feel that way about CNN. That trust is even higher on the local level for a lot of the organizations we know and the ones we work in now.

That’s the name of the game. Journalists, for very good reason, have talked for years about the importance of trust. But I think we’re entering a new era where trust and truth will be a distinctive, literally valued proposition all on its own because it’s endangered. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s human and what’s right.

People are going to come to the brands they think are doing it right.

Bill Smee: We’ll get to some of the future considerations that you’re leading us to. A quick question to pick up on something you were saying. This is not really CNN-specific — I was at NBC News Digital in the same period — but all legacy media faced this tension between how much to invest in digital, especially when the TV side, and in CNN’s case the cable side, was still generating the revenue and all the heat and light.

Looking back, and not to say “look back in anger,” do you think CNN invested enough during the Jeff Zucker years in digital innovation, audience development, and other things that could have helped build for the future you’re now speaking of?

Meredith Artley: We invested a lot in digital — different flavors of digital. It’s why I got to stalk someone like Mitra and lure her to CNN. Mitra was a key part of hiring and growing and building this incredible team at a critical time — not just at CNN, but in the news cycle of the nation and the world.

There was a lot of investment. I think you could challenge whether the investment was made in the right places. For our earlier conversation, should we have done more in the core and more on technical innovation that supports the spread of accurate, trusted journalism and creative formats in wonderful new ways, as opposed to spending a lot of money doing things on the side? I think you can say that now in hindsight. Maybe we could have done a little bit more of that.

There was a lot of investment and a lot of action.

Here’s a small thing Jeff did. Mitra will remember this because she had to do it sometimes. Jeff Zucker changed the structure of the news meetings when he came on. He jumped in and was running them. There was a 9 o’clock network-wide news meeting — in person, over Zoom, on the phone — and everyone got together and talked about the agenda for the day.

During my time there, I went from digital being in the room to hear what everybody on TV was planning, to Jeff saying, “I need digital to go first and talk about the audience. I need to know and I need you to give context.”

So at the top of the meeting, we would say, “This is how much audience we got yesterday. We got 22 million unique users yesterday across our digital platforms. The top three things they were interested in were X, Y, and Z.”

It was a small thing, but it was a significant act to say to an organization that is a broadcast/cable legacy organization that the definitive planning meeting for the day’s news is going to start with audience focus because that’s what digital is so good at.

Things like that really helped push us forward. I hope they’re still doing it. I don’t know how they’re running the news meetings these days.

John Hashimoto: I’ve long had a question — and this represents my personal point of view as a question, really — which is, didn’t we kind of blow some money on Great Big Story and Beme? Would the better investment have been an acquisition? Acquire Vox, acquire some other editorial product that was more innovative and digital-first, maybe subscription-oriented, so we understood the digital subscription business better, versus spinning up those two things.

Easy for me to say. I’m Monday-morning-quarterbacking here. Thoughts on that? Were those two the right things to spend the money on?

S. Mitra Kalita: I think we’d disagree with you. It depends tonally.

There were aspects of Great Big Story that fit what a lot of visual storytellers wanted to do. There were stories there that the network could be really proud of from a talent-retention perspective. Even though I am the weird one in journalism who remains a breaking-news junkie — I love breaking news — that’s really not the case for the talent pool we’re dealing with. That’s a whole other issue: what happens to the talent pool of journalism?

But there are aspects of Great Big Story that, from a talent acquisition and retention perspective, felt important.

The Casey Neistat/Beme situation was an early indicator that just because you bring in certain talent doesn’t mean it’s suddenly going to make you cool on the internet. That’s partly cultural. Someone just told me that Joanna Stern, who’s working for NBC now, had one of her early collaborations with Casey Neistat, and it took off because somehow that collaboration among creators worked.

CNN had a lot of money when I was there. I benefited from that immensely. My life is different as a human being, as an entrepreneur, even the home I live in now. CNN was a pretty flush organization.

Some of the bets you’re talking about, in hindsight we’ll say, “Well, that felt like a waste of money.” The other thing I’ll say, which I have internalized — and I know Meredith has too because she’s a CEO, and as a CEO you’re largely defined by the revenue you bring into an organization — is that CNN, for better or worse, gave a lot of creative journalists a lot of money to play in sandboxes without a clear model or revenue path.

CNN was not the only one doing that. A lot of news organizations did that during that digital time period because many of us fashioned ourselves as creatures of the internet. We could play and get eyeballs, but it didn’t necessarily mean there was a business model there.

That’s another lesson I apply to the work I do now.

Meredith Artley: I think it’s easy — it is hindsight quarterbacking, as you say, John — to judge Great Big Story or Beme or Zite in hindsight. But it’s hard, as Mitra says, especially now in a CEO role for a much smaller organization. You’re still charged with making these decisions and taking bets and taking risks. So I give those decisions some grace as well.

I just would have invested more in the core, where the main audience is and where innovation needs to happen. That’s the drum I’m going to beat. That’s what I wish for CNN going forward.

Bill Smee: Let’s shift. We’re trying to wrap in a handful of minutes. I want to move away from the business model to the shift in culture in the mobile-social era, where voice more and more started to matter and audiences expected more transparency, identity, accountability, and lived experience.

Did CNN’s traditional neutral voice become a strength, or maybe a hindrance or constraint? Was it a little bit of both? Mitra, I’ll start with you.

S. Mitra Kalita: It’s a great question.

I ran the opinion section. Ironically, a guy who hired me as an intern at Newsday ended up reporting to me. That’s also the “you never know who’s going to end up at CNN” story.

Digitally, we really tried to make a place for opinionating on the internet and this idea of a take, which was how so much daily journalism was built. We clearly labeled it. People clearly had a point of view. Many CNN contributors were part of that report. If you think about Van Jones or David Axelrod, these are large personalities linked to CNN. I saw that as an asset in terms of having access to the voices that were defining us on TV and being able to use them digitally.

The harder part with the neutral voice, especially around breaking news, is that there is a way a news story has historically been structured. A lot of what we saw succeeding, especially in the social space, was a take, an outrageous headline, something that would make you feel a certain way. CNN stayed away from that, even as my jam was headlines that would try to inspire a little bit of outrage. That was what I was known for. So I would try to push us, but it was always right up against it. It wasn’t quite what BuzzFeed or even The Washington Post would do.

CNN did not rely on social traffic as heavily as those organizations did. My guess — and I haven’t asked anyone at CNN about their numbers — is that as social started to devalue journalism, CNN did not experience the traffic drop-off that those organizations did. The price you paid for a take, or for being opinionated or not being neutral, was that you had to rely on certain platforms and the types of content they favored.

In hindsight, I sometimes think CNN wasn’t shared because I think of the news as CNN delivers it as more of a public utility. Whereas if you share stories from The New Yorker or The Washington Post, it’s an assertion of your intellect and how smart you are. A lot of those headlines are an assertion of your point of view.

CNN played the middle of the road. “We are trying to give people the bread and butter of news. There’s not embellishment. We’re just going to tell you what happened.” I didn’t love it all the time. But in hindsight, I think that was the place, and that was who was coming to us. There’s something to be said for just giving people the facts straight up.

Meredith Artley: Mitra, you have to edit yourself. You were not doing outrage headline writing. You were great. There would be moments where Mitra would say, “I’m not having a great day, so to make myself feel better, I went and edited some headlines on the homepage.”

I love that because it’s a sign that a lot of us do this. There’s something that feels hard to control, but then there’s one thing you can do that’s going to make an impact.

You were, and are, I’m sure, still excellent at capturing the essence of a story in a way that creates interest. We were constantly talking about this. I remember Jeff using words like, “We’re being too genteel. Let’s use language that is vivid and interesting.”

I don’t think we were ever driving toward outrage or clickbait. We definitely had conversations around that. There were moments where we thought we might be getting close and said, “Let’s reel it in.” But we were trying to do something compelling and interesting, not overly robotic or removed.

That is the daily art of journalism these days: How do you do that? You’re not doing it for clicks, but you’re doing it for interest because these are really important stories and they matter. So let’s get people engaged while keeping trust steady and growing if we can.

John Hashimoto: We have about three more questions. Let’s keep them tight and try to get through them. So, of course, the AI question. If you were both in the same positions you were in then, what would be your perspective on AI? Would it be keeping you up at night? Or would it be an opportunity for CNN?

S. Mitra Kalita: I am so glad I’m not at CNN in this AI era. That’s my answer, John.

I have been able to leverage AI as a journalist and as someone running a newsroom in ways I never could at CNN. That is probably a freeing gift and a freeing answer to your question because I don’t know how you codify a policy around this for thousands of people. I think it’s kind of a losing proposition. There are ethical dilemmas and moral dilemmas.

From a reskilling perspective, even getting people to understand prompts and vibe coding — it’s a whole new vocabulary. We had it easy in some ways. We were trying to get participation and integration. “You’re doing this work anyway. Let’s just move it over here, or let us know what you’re working on.”

There’s a part of me that feels like, in the AI economy, the best answer is to run a local newsroom of five or fewer people, because that’s the best way to leverage the technology afforded to us now. That’s one answer, and that’s what I’m doing in my local news site.

There’s another question: Is it the job of organizations like CNN to meet this moment having already been burned by the platforms as we have been? I think this is part of what The New York Times is doing in looking at AI through the lens of copyright.

For CNN, could they be leading in this space to say, “No, not again”? Could they develop an approach when it comes to copyright?

Unfortunately, with the AI platforms right now, your success on the internet that no longer exists is still highly relevant. CNN was number one for the decade previous. When you search in AI chat, it will often turn up CNN because it’s a favored result. CNN probably has the power to combat some of that. But given the trillion-dollar-plus valuations of some of these companies, even CNN isn’t big enough to combat what we’re up against.

I feel like I gave you a wishy-washy but very honest answer.

Bill Smee: That’s a good one. Let me ask a big-picture question for both of you about the future of CNN. We’re in a moment when new ownership is pending, as it were. Meredith, you’ve made some references to protecting the core. If you had the opportunity, what would you tell the next owners of CNN, the whole enterprise, to protect at all costs and double down on? What is most important going forward?

Meredith Artley: Build, grow, and innovate your own tech.

Double down on breaking news. That doesn’t mean do more of it necessarily. It doesn’t mean put the banner up on the screen more. It means innovate around breaking news. No brand has the permission CNN has, and people have the need to find out what is actually going on when big stuff is happening.

And really invest in international. It’s a global news organization. Trusted stories from all over the world — not just the news-gathering piece, but the storytelling piece. That’s it: tech, breaking news, and global.

That’s my answer, Bill.

Bill Smee: Good one. Mitra, any advice?

S. Mitra Kalita: Plus one to everything Meredith just said.

I would add one thing, which is an area where I could certainly use a lot of help: being live in more places and going big on the midterms.

You’re seeing a lot of innovation and a lot of creators. But even in New York media — the most covered market in America — if you ask, “Are you covering these three congressional races outside of Manhattan?” the answer is usually no.

I do a ton of community forums and debates. You could ask me to moderate dog catcher and I’d be like, “Yeah, we’ll be there.” I learned this at CNN: this idea of not just creating moments, but of an excellence you can count on in how a debate and discussion will be moderated. You guys remember the hours and hours of practice and role-playing that go into staging events and debates.

I’m not saying you have to apply that locally, but this idea of being in a lot of places is something CNN could bring. It’s not a lot for them because they already have the infrastructure to go live across the country. I would love to see more of that, especially for the upcoming midterms.

John Hashimoto: Last question: Meredith, where do you think journalism goes from here?

Bill Smee: A small question.

Meredith Artley: I’ll do my best. I think it goes into more trust. I see optimism out there. It’s fueled a little bit by some negativity: the rise of not knowing where things are coming from, not knowing if it’s human or not, not knowing who or what to trust. People feel disconnected. They feel like they’ve been engineered to doomscroll all day.

People need to know what is actually going on, and they need an organization that will help them figure that out. We’re trying to do that on the local level at Hawai‘i Public Radio, and it seems to be working really well. I wish that for CNN on the global scale with that brand that’s so important.

I also have a lot of optimism around local news. I’m biased, but I’m seeing things I haven’t seen before, including on the business model.

At CNN, we were challenged by the fact that revenue from major distributors was declining, ad sales were declining, while digital was rising in every single metric, but it just hadn’t caught up all the way. That’s the trend in many large legacy companies.

CNN launched a direct-to-consumer subscription model in the last year. But the irony is that here at this little public media station in Hawai‘i, the direct-to-consumer model is working. And we give the product away for free. There’s no paywall. People just give what they want and what they can.

Now that federal funding has been pulled, we are 100% community-backed, and the revenue is stronger than it has ever been. So that gives me hope and a clear metric that people are saying they need something they can trust on a local level.

That’s why I’m extremely stoked to join Mitra and some of our former colleagues — I’m thinking of Rachel Smolkin over in Oregon — who are doing great work on the local level, taking all these lessons we learned at CNN, translating them locally, and hopefully making local news even stronger.

That gives me great optimism for the future of journalism.

John Hashimoto: Excellent. A great way to land. Meredith and Mitra, thank you for your time, your candor, your perspective, and for helping us understand this pivotal chapter in CNN’s story.

Thanks to all of you for watching Breaking the News: Deep Cut Conversations. If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with anyone who cares about journalism, technology, public trust, and the future of news.

We’re also inviting you to help us bring the full documentary podcast series Breaking the News: CNN and the Birth of Chaos Media to life. This is an independent project built on deep reporting, archival research, and conversations like this one. We’re examining how the modern news ecosystem was built, where it fractured, and what’s at stake now for journalism and democracy.

You’ll find a link below to learn more about the project and support it. Every contribution helps us bring the story to life.

Thanks for being part of our community. We’ll see you next time.

Help Us Bring the Full Series to Life

Breaking the News: CNN and the Birth of Chaos Media is an independent documentary podcast series examining how one media innovation reshaped journalism, rewired public trust, and helped create the chaotic information environment we now inhabit.

We are building this series through deep reporting, archival research, original interviews, and conversations like this one.

If this conversation resonates with you, please share it with others who care about journalism, technology, trust, democracy, and the future of news.

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This conversation features Steve Korn, former Chief Operating Officer at CNN. Steve served in a range of senior roles at Turner Broadcasting beginning in the early 1980s and has valuable insights into how the media business has evolved over decades during his long career.

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Join Tom Johnson, Miles O’Brien and others in supporting this independent documentary series

Steve had extensive firsthand experience working with Ted Turner. We spoke to him just weeks before Turner passed away, and he shared his unique perspective on Ted’s legacy.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• CNN’s business model and early growth

• How competition from Fox News and MSNBC changed the game

• CNN’s early efforts at digital transformation and the challenges that presented

• Why and how mergers changed CNN’s trajectory

• The uncertain future of CNN and global news

• Ted Turner’s legacy

If you prefer to read, here is a transcript of our interview:

Bill Smee (00:00)

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Breaking the News, Deep Cut Conversations, our interview series that previews our forthcoming documentary podcast, Breaking the News, CNN, and the Birth of Chaos Media. I’m Bill Smee, and I’m joined by my co-host and series co-producer John Hashimoto. Hey, John. And our guest today is Steve Korn.

John Hashimoto (00:17)

Hi Bill.

Bill Smee (00:21)

former longtime senior executive at Turner Broadcasting and CNN. And over the course of his career, Steve has seen firsthand how the media industry has evolved and adapted and how technology has changed the business model, creating challenges for CNN and companies and outlets across the media landscape. Steve, welcome and thanks for joining us.

Steve Korn (00:41)

That’s my pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me. Great.

Bill Smee (00:44)

Well, so we’ll dive in here and before we get into the current state of media, I’d love to take you back, I’d for you to take us back to the early years working for Ted Turner. What was it that made in your mind Ted so successful as a cable TV businessman and what lessons from that era do you think are still relevant today?

Steve Korn (01:08)

Well, think Ted was pretty unique person. He was it. He was a visionary. There’s no two ways about it. He he literally went for a walk in the woods and thought about creating CNN and not many people have that skill set. I think he was just blessed by the gods with that ability. So I guess whenever you find, if you find visionaries today, I’m sure that they can in their own ways.

create their own businesses. But that’s one of the things that Ted brought to the table.

John Hashimoto (01:44)

Now, Ted, Steve risks a lot in pursuing this vision. And during those beginning years, was no certainty it was going to work. In fact, the money was being drained to build this thing up. There were some hairy moments, as we all know, for Ted Turner and the team at CNN.

In your mind, when did CNN break through? Not from a journalism standpoint, but from a market business standpoint?

Steve Korn (02:09)

Well, can’t identify, there’s one event I can identify that I know really turned things around, but it was a slow build. As you know, CNN launched on June 1, 1980. And when it launched, it had 1.7 million subscribers. That was it. By the year 2000, it had a hundred million. So there was a steady rise in subscribers and viewership and therefore advertising revenue as well.

But the thing that really exploded CNN on a business from a business standpoint was Gulf War one. And it CNN proved its in dispensability when that when that war broke out and it was the first time that a war was covered as intimately and was, you know, as in depth and live ever in history.

Prior wars were covered by guys who went out in the field with film and they had to ship it back, say, from Vietnam and developed the film. And by the time it got on air, you know, it was pretty much it could be obsolete. CNN was broadcasting live from Iraq, from Kuwait, from everywhere in the Middle East where there were events taking place that were covering. And it caught the fancy of the world as well.

I may have told you guys this story, but later on in the 90s, we owned 50 % of the news network in Germany. And in that, and I was sat on the board of that news network and in connection with our operations in Germany, we had to pay a visit to the German Antitrust Authority.

And we had our meeting and after the meeting, the head of the Antitrust Authority in Germany pulled me aside and said, I want to thank you for CNN because it was the only way that we knew what was really happening in the war. And I, of course, took total credit for it. No, but I mean, it had a profound effect on me because I realized the impact that CNN had not only in the U.S., but certainly around the world.

Bill Smee (04:21)

You know, it’s interesting. I think a lot of people, you you were intimately involved with the business side of the business, both at Turner and CNN. A lot of people don’t really understand how CNN and other cable networks became profitable. Could you, for like a fourth grader, explain how cable fees used to work and how that resulted in a kind of baseline of revenue and profitability that kind of is still with us to some extent?

Steve Korn (04:49)

Yeah, except unfortunately the subscriber fees are way down because the number of subscribers are way down. It was, the early cable networks, CNN, ESPN, and some of the other early commercial networks were the beneficiaries of a rising tide lifting all boats. As I mentioned a minute ago, we launched with 1.7 million subscribers.

Not a big number and not a number in which you could turn a profit long term. But as the number of subscribers increased, it did two things. One, it increased the per subscriber fee, subscription fee that we charged cable operators. And with a larger audience, we were able to increase our advertising rates and therefore our revenue. as I recall, the revenue split between subscription fees and advertising was roughly fifty fifty, so i mean it was a great benefit to the company from a business standpoint that the number of subscribers were increasing pretty steadily and pretty dramatically so in the course of twenty years went from one point seven million subs to one hundred million subs

John Hashimoto (06:09)

you know CNN pretty much had the playing field to itself. Yeah, about a decade maybe or a little less than a decade.

Steve Korn (06:17)

It was more than a decade. 1980, and I think that Fox and MSNBC you can check me on this launched about in 96 or so.

John Hashimoto (06:27)

That’s right. Now here’s the question. What was the feeling by you as a business leader and a finance folks, the people really concerned about horizons? it clear to you that, these new entrants are going to definitely eat away at our edges or eat away at our market share?

Steve Korn (06:46)

Well, early on, was clear that they were competition. And we, of course, went from having 100 % of the cable news market to having something less than that. We did not envision that Fox in particular would grow as fast as they did and garner the kind of audience that they did and eventually get better average for a long time. Even though they had a better viewership, we had better advertising rates because of our demo.

But over time that went away. And I don’t think we appreciated, certainly not on day one or day 60 of Fox’s existence, that they would grow as fast as they did. But then, you know, I don’t have to tell you that became more than just competition. They became the leader in terms of viewership and advertising revenue and profitability. They had an advantage that they were very smart to capitalize on.

They recognized that all the people who were listening to right-wing talk radio needed a home on TV, and that’s what they gave them. So they had this built-in rock-solid audience of people on the right of the political spectrum, and that was their base, and they used it to great advantage.

Bill Smee (08:10)

It’s funny, around that same time, mid to late 90s, there was another threat or opportunity as well, which is the emergence of the internet and digital technology. CNN was a cable business, TV business. What pressures did that place on CNN and how do you think in those first years CNN responded?

Steve Korn (08:32)

Well, I think we, I know we responded quickly and, and, and, in creating and financing our online offerings and CNN.com was up and running pretty quickly. so I think under the circumstances, we did a pretty decent job of making sure that we hopped on that train before it ran away.

But, know, the real threat from the digital revolution was that people had so many more choices and that it was very difficult, still is very difficult to command the kind of audience that would justify the kinds of advertising rates that we were charging. And then, of course, as the cord cutters came along and the number of subscribers dropped substantially from 100 million to that. I’m not sure where it is today, but I know it’s substantially less. You know, the, the rising tide and the double stream of revenue that we profited from started, the tide started to go, go back out from the shore. So, it changed the world. I mean, it changed our business anyway. and it’s still a huge dilemma for CNN. I haven’t been at CNN for a long time, but it’s a huge dilemma for the company. CNN will never again, I don’t believe have the kind of audience and the kind of the percentage of the audience that it had even after Fox and MSNBC came along. There’s just too many outlets, too many ways to get news instantaneously.

John Hashimoto (10:11)

One question though that I always have when I was there sitting in an interactive newsroom was, should, or now I’m thinking back on it, was should CNN have made, been more aggressive on the digital side in investments or acquisitions that would have put it in a better place today than it is?

Steve Korn (10:28)

Well, you know, the old cliche that hindsight’s 2020 and I think it’s true here. We were feeling our way and trying to react as quickly as we could. But of course, we had a huge investment in the television network networks, because, as you know, we had several iterations of CNN and headline news and CNN in Espanol. So there was tremendous infrastructure infrastructure and hunger for for resources that those existing networks had. But I think we recognized that early on that we had to be in the digital space. But it was a tough go.

Bill Smee (11:11)

You know so much was happening at that period. We talked about competition, the emergence of digital in response or I don’t know, but mergers, right? You were there and had a front row seat, obviously, first with the Time Warner and then the AOL a few years later. guess the question simple is kind of what drove those at the time and how do you think those impacted CNN specifically?

Steve Korn (11:37)

Well, let me talk to the Time Warner merger because I was right in the middle of it. And to understand it, you have to understand that 11 years before we merged with Time Warner, we went off and bought MGM for a very steep price. Although the truth of the matter is that that movie library was worth more to us than it was to anyone else. And Ted recognized that immediately. And it gave us the largest movie library in the world. And with that library, we were not only able to fortify TBS, but we were able to create from scratch TNT, Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies. And those networks pretty quickly developed, created an asset value that was far in excess of the cost of the purchase of MGM. However, in order to complete the MGM transaction, we had to borrow a lot of money. And there were fairly onerous terms at the time. So Ted turned to a consortium of large cable operators and we sold 40 % of the equity of the company to that consortium of cable operators and they had seats on our board. There were things we needed supermajority control that gave them the ability to veto or block things. And so that changed the dynamic. It was no longer Ted’s company in the way that it was before.

When I first got involved with Ted, he literally owned over 90 % of the company. I think it was like 92 % of the company. So we were technically a public company, but we were operated like a sole proprietorship. And that changed dramatically when we sold the equity to the cable operators. And what Ted ultimately realized is that we obviously we had to grow. And believe it or not, the cable operators to some extent didn’t want us to grow. I can tell you of a situation where we wanted to buy what was then Financial News Network. And we had a deal for it. And we brought the deal to the board and they turned it down. And they turned it down, I believe, because they didn’t want us to acquire another cable network and increase our leverage against cable operators. And so we didn’t complete the deal, NBC did, and it became CNBC.

So that, it became abundantly clear that we were, Ted was no longer really driving the company because there were things that they could veto. And he realized that we’re going, the company as a whole, not just CNN, but TBS as a whole, all of the entertainment networks, as well as CNN needed to grow. And in order to grow, we needed to be in a larger company. So that’s what led to the merger with Time Warner. And I’ll tell you that a lot of us always felt that if that happened, the more likely acquirer would have been John Malone’s group. Because Malone, I think, was very good at playing nice with Ted and Ted liked them. Time Warner guys in those days were much more hard-nosed. But the way that the Time Warner merger came around is that Ted was at his ranch in Montana and got a phone call from Jerry Levin who said, can I come out and see you this weekend? Didn’t tell him why. Jerry flew out and proposed the merger. Ted agreed to it on the spot.

And he came back to the office Monday morning and there were a small group of us who were gathered and he came in and told us that he had agreed to this and we needed to get the deal done. But one of us asked him, I don’t remember who it was, why he chose Time Warner. And he said that he chose Time Warner because he wanted to know that when CNN was gone, the company would be housed in a company that shared our journalistic approach because of Time Inc.

Now, as you know, that turned out not to really be the case. And the Time Inc. magazines were offloaded and Time Warner was much less a journalism company than the old Time Warner. But that was his reason or one of his reasons. And he also knew that we needed greater reach and greater, greater resources, not reach. We needed greater resources and we couldn’t do it on both because we were on a relative basis small and because the cable operators had negative control.

Bill Smee (16:41)

There was also, it seemed a trend of sort of bigger is better at that point. It was just part of it. But I’m just wondering, and again, not to use the 2020 hindsight, but in retrospect, have we maybe learned that bigger isn’t always better?

Steve Korn (16:58)

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that in this case, it is better because it’s all about resources. It’s all about marketing. And if you don’t have the resources to promote your company and be able to continue to do acquisitions and whatnot, you’re going to be left behind.

So what we’ve seen now subsequent to all this is a great consolidation in the media business. And I’m not necessarily a fan of it. I have a certain level of sadness when I see these companies merging. And I don’t think it’s necessarily, I know it’s not good for journalism and it’s probably not good for the creative community in Hollywood, but that’s the way things are going. And I don’t know how you stop it. And I don’t know what… I don’t know what the next iteration after this will be. Maybe it’ll be better for journalists and for creative types in Hollywood. I don’t know.

John Hashimoto (17:57)

Which leads us not to AOL Time Warner merger. We could spend an hour on that, but let’s jump right ahead to Paramount. As you look at what’s happening here, what parallels do you see compared to some of those other acquisitions and mergers? Unfortunately, it’s been far more than we can almost count when it comes to the Time Warner asset, I’ll call it.

Let me frame it also this way. A lot of journalists look at the New York Times and family ownership and go, gosh, we wish Ted, this was a family affair, the Ted affair. So those are a couple of different questions. Let me see if that’s too many questions. What do you think? What’s your thinking about the Paramount deal? And would CNN in particular be better off if it was family-owned?

Steve Korn (18:44)

Yes, in answer to your last question. Yes, I think so. But it’s a tall order for any family because it’s still a very expensive operation to keep going. But, you know, even with its decreased subscription revenue, CNN is still pretty profitable. But it’s still a large business and you would need a family not only with great wealth, but with great staying power and commitment.

And I don’t know that that exists anywhere for CNN. So CNN is kind of blowing in the wind in terms of these deals and is not in control of its destiny in any way, or form. And I find that very sad. I think my sadness is more than just nostalgia for a time when I was younger and involved in a company that was very exciting to be part of. I don’t think it’s good for America. I don’t think that the great consolidation that we’re seeing is good for the country. I think we need a diversity of voices. We need multiple outlets for the creative community in Hollywood to have places to distribute their intellectual property.

It’s very funny that people think that CNN has been very liberal. I guess, supposedly, I guess compared to Fox, maybe that’s true. But I don’t think we ever changed our approach to the news in a way that was anything other than trying to be fair to the facts. But now you have an acquirer who appears to have a political agenda. And I think that that is not a good thing for CNN. Maybe they’ll surprise us and they’ll give it relative autonomy and let the chips fall where they may in terms of news coverage. But I’m a pessimist by nature.

John Hashimoto (20:55)

in the face of all the changes in our media world, is it possible to have a successful global news network in a direct to consumer streaming world and digital world, you think, Steve? Or is CNN going to have to shrink given the new realities?

Steve Korn (21:15)

Great question. To be honest, I’m not sure I know the answer. I would hope that CNN would not have to shrink, that it still has a great brand and a high recognition. So I do think that it might be possible for CNN to adapt to the digital world and still be profitable and widely viewed. But I’m not positive.

Bill Smee (21:44)

I guess the other question out of this though, as you look now zooming out as an observer, know, the business model for journalism, like the rest of media, has really been under threat, constant change. Is there anyone out there, or is there any model out there that you look at and see that gives you maybe cause for hope? Because there’s so much despair right now. This is broken, that’s broken. Cable fees are down, as you said. But I’m looking more broadly, looking at the whole landscape. Is there anything that gives you a ray of hope?

Steve Korn (22:20)

Other than a white knight riding in on a big, horse, I’m not sure. It’s the days of the dominance or the pervasive viewership of CNN and networks like it may be over because, but I know my own children are in their thirties. They’re not cable subscribers, but they know they have access to all the news they could ever want online. And it’s just a million different sources for them.

You know, we went into the cable business. I’m sure you remember in the early days, people were talking about how we had 500 channels and who would be able to watch it. Well, 500 channels is a pittance compared to what’s going on now. And how any one service can get a commanding position, it’s difficult. So the business model has to change, obviously. The scale has to be smaller. And I think if the scale is smaller, it’s difficult to provide the kind of coverage that we attempted to provide at CNN.

Bill Smee (23:30)

Well, one last quick thing on that. You mentioned the 500 channels. Do you think there is someone out there looking at the digital universe, places like Substack and others, and wondering, will bundling come back in some fashion? Is there some theory where your children in their 30s, here are the 50 Substacks and YouTube channels that I like, and there might be some way to create a bundle the way Comcast and all the other cable operators did? What are your thoughts on that?

Steve Korn (23:57)

Yeah, if the right if the right properties were in the bundle and had and those properties had wide were widely attractive to people, it’s certainly possible, you know, the question is, who’s the bundler? Do you need a big company to be the bundler? Right. And I don’t know. I really don’t. And I have to leave the answer to those questions to people younger than me at this point.

John Hashimoto (24:27)

Steve, when Ted does pass, how do you hope he is remembered? Not by those of us who worked with him or for him, but maybe your kids, so to speak. How will he be remembered in history, you think? And how do you hope he’s remembered?

Steve Korn (24:42)

I hope he’s remembered as a genius, with great vision and a pretty pure heart in terms of what he was trying to accomplish. And it’s not just his purely business achievements, which are phenomenal, but his philanthropy and his environmental stance. And I have a little card that he gave me the last time I saw him at lunch about a year and a half maybe ago. And it’s his 11 voluntary initiatives. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. But they’re all things that I think I know you would agree with about protecting the earth and, and, and eliminating war and stuff. He feels those things deeply and he’s lived them, you know.

I’ll never forget. I was in my car and I was on 285 in Atlanta and I’m driving along the phone rings and it was Tom Johnson. And he says to me, do you know anything about Ted donating? And I’ll say blank to the UN. I said, no, but it’s just a million dollars. So what he said, no, I didn’t say a million dollars. I said a billion dollars. I almost drove off the road, you know, but that, that kind of willingness to share your resources to try to make the world better should be at the heart of what I hope Ted is remembered for. I really do. I mean, you could list his business achievements and they will stand up to anyone else in the history of the United States. But he has this added element of wanting to do good and putting his money where his mouth is.

Bill Smee (26:30)

That’s fabulous. Great place to wrap things up. I want to thank you again, Steve, for taking the time with us today and sharing your insights about TED, about the evolution of CNN, the business, the landscape, and frankly, what the future may hold. So thank you for that. And I want to say thanks to all of those out there who are watching this and listening to Breaking the News Deep Cut Conversations. If this discussion struck a chord, we hope you will share it.

We’re also inviting you to help us bring our documentary podcast fully to life. This is an independent project built on deep reporting, archival research, and interviews like this one. It’s about examining how the modern news ecosystem was built, where it fractured, and what’s at stake now. Your support makes that possible. You’ll find a link below to learn more about and to contribute, if you like, to our fundraising campaign. Every donation is tax deductible.

and it will help us create the series and bring the story to college campuses and public forums across the country. In the weeks ahead, we’ll release additional deep cut conversations, each one designed to illuminate another part of the story. We’ll see you next time.

The bulletins this morning delivered news we all knew was coming in a matter of time: Ted Turner had passed away at age 87, eight years after being diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.

Of all the tycoons who have seized America’s imagination—from John D. Rockefeller to Howard Hughes to the edgelord of the moment, Elon Musk—Ted Turner is arguably the great outlier.

Yes, they all classify as brilliant business innovators. High-wire gamblers. Audacious. Narcissistic. Grandiose.

But Turner? Turner was larger than larger-than-life.

A world-class yachtsman. A Civil War buff. A not-so-secret serial philanderer who married a Hollywood icon. A swashbuckling entrepreneur who built a global media empire from a ragtag TV station in Atlanta.

More than all that, Ted—and he insisted everyone call him Ted—was a capitalist with the soul of an idealist. He didn’t just say he wanted to make the world a better place. Turner spent—and in some cases, lost—billions trying to do it.

As Bill Burke, who helped Turner write his 2008 autobiography Call Me Ted, told us for this podcast: “Ted just did things bigger and differently than just about anybody. And when you add it all up, it’s staggering—and exhausting.”

For the past three years, we’ve been conducting deep-dive research and interviews with key players and former company insiders for the making of Breaking the News—with a focus on the man at its center. Through intimate conversations with those who worked alongside him—and those who chronicled his Shakespearean rise and fall—his presence still looms large.

Billionaire business icons don’t usually make friends and admirers. They build empires, amass fortunes, and instill fear. But as you will hear from those we interviewed, Ted Turner is different. He is an iconoclastic titan—with a heart.

In this interview conducted just days before Turner’s death, former CNN COO Steve Korn, who helped Ted build CNN into a global media giant, told us that among Ted’s too many to count achievements, he should be remembered for “putting his money where his mouth is” as a once-in-a-generation philanthropist.

The Podcast Series Interviews

Here are a series of other tributes to Ted from our interview collection:

You can also watch our Deep Cut Conversations with former Turner executive Bill Burke, co-author of Ted Turner’s autobiography Call Me Ted, and journalist Lisa Napoli, whose book Up All Night chronicles Ted’s improbable launch of CNN.

Support this Podcast Series

A Message from the Breaking the News Producing Team

If you believe that understanding how journalism changed — and how trust was lost — is essential to rebuilding a healthier information system, we invite you to support this independent documentary project. Because the fate of CNN’s experiment is bigger than CNN. It’s about the future of reporting-based journalism and whether truth itself can survive in the media environment we live in today. If this project resonates with you, please consider becoming a supporter and helping us bring Breaking the News to life.

This conversation features Rick Davis, former senior executive at CNN. Rick joined the network at its launch in 1980 and spent more than four decades in a variety of roles. He was EVP of Editorial Standards and Practices when he retired in 2021.

Donate to Bring the Podcast to Life

Join Tom Johnson, Miles O’Brien and others in supporting this independent documentary series

Davis’ long tenure at CNN gave him a unique insider’s perspective on how the network evolved over time, as competition and technology changed the journalism landscape.

We spoke with him as CNN again finds itself in transition, with a looming change in ownership playing out in a politically charged moment on a media landscape that is radically different from the one Ted Turner helped invent.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• How CNN’s launch forever changed the idea of network news

• The early stories that put CNN on the map and the challenges of maintaining audiences on days without big news

• How the overuse of the “breaking news” banner undermines credibility and sows distrust

• Why media mergers never seem to go well

• How the roots of today’s partisanship in media can be traced back to Rush Limbaugh and the rise of talk radio in the 1990s

• How minor mistakes and lapses get weaponized and hurt CNN and other media outlets

• Why CNN and journalism may have a brighter future than many people realize

If you prefer to read, here is a transcript of our interview:

Bill Smee (00:00)

Hey everyone, welcome to Breaking the News, Deep Cut Conversations. It’s our interview series that previews our forthcoming documentary podcast, Breaking the News, CNN and the Birth of Chaos Media. I’m Bill Smee and I’m joined today by my co-host and series co-producer, John Hashimoto. Hello, John.

John Hashimoto (00:18)

Hey everyone, how are you, Bill?

Bill Smee (00:19)

Good, and our guest today is a special one, Rick Davis. He was a former executive at CNN who joined the network at its launch back in 1980, spent over 40 years in a variety of senior roles before his retirement in 2021. Now, over the course of his career, Rick saw firsthand how CNN evolved and adapted as technology and competition radically changed the media industry, which makes him an ideal person to talk to about how we have gotten to where we are and what the future may hold for journalism and the public trust. Rick, welcome and thanks so much for joining us.

Rick Davis (00:56)

Well, thanks, Bill. Thanks, John.

And I hope I can answer some of those well-meaning questions about the business we care so much about.

Bill Smee (01:07)

Sure. Well, I’m gonna start, we’re gonna go back in time and start with a bit of history and kind of a fun question. Now, when Ted Turner launched CNN way back in June of 1980, it was the first 24-7 all news network. And that was really considered revolutionary at the time, because it was a major disruption to the prevailing broadcast network news model. Rick, how would you explain the sort of significance of CNN’s launch to say a younger person who wasn’t alive then?

Rick Davis (01:38)

Well, if you were a news consumer, the important thing to remember, to know now about then is how would you consume news if you were really an information seeker? You would only be able to open your front door and get the newspaper in the morning. As far as television news was concerned, you’d have television news till 9 a.m. until local news began at that time about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. So there was a news desert for television between 9 a.m. and 5 o’clock when local news would come on before the network news had followed.

There was all news radio in some markets, but not all. So in terms of, you know, in the middle of the day, when we were so familiar with so many things happening and be instantly updated about what was going on right now, there was no way for you to know about that. And so in many ways, when CNN came on and basically said, news when you want it. That’s what made it so revolutionary. So it grew and grew and grew. But once again, you have to keep in mind that for the first 15 years or so of CNN, we had a monopoly on those news deserts, putting aside radio for a second, but basically in terms of picture and instant news in the middle of the day. Until digital media came in the late ‘90s and in 1996, Fox News and MSNBC started, but once again, they started with a couple million homes and grew and grew and grew. So it wasn’t until after the turn of the century that they were actually in tens of millions of homes competing with CNN.

John Hashimoto (03:49)

Looking back at the first 10 to 15 years of the network, there was a lot of major breaking news events, right? As you think back on those early days, if we can call it that, what do you think sets CNN apart from a coverage and a journalism standpoint? Do you remember one incident in particular, one coverage moment in particular that you felt, we made it, this is it, we’ve shown what the power of this network can be.

Rick Davis (04:16)

Well, you know, when you’re working in the basement of the former social club mansion on Techwood Drive, it’s hard for you to kind of get a feel out in the rest of the country for how it really makes a difference. For me personally, as a political junkie, a government major, I worked on a campaign, worked in Capitol Hill, went to college in Washington. I asked to be a part of the 1984 presidential campaign. They let me go and be a floor reporter with Jim Miklaszewski, one of our great reporters who went on to NBC and had a stellar career as a White House correspondent. I was his floor producer in Dallas at the 1984 Republican convention. I walked in into the hall there and looked up and, you know, seeing the sky booths that house Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley and the others and seeing CNN’s sky booth as large and as prominent as the other ones said to me, oh my gosh, we are there.

Bill Smee (05:36)

You you mentioned obviously in those early years, the first decade and a half really, CNN kind of had a captive audience because there wasn’t competition just yet per se, other than news radio. That changed, as you already mentioned, in the mid-’90s when Fox and MSNBC came into being. I guess, simple question is, in your view, how did their arrival on the cable dial change CNN?

Rick Davis (06:07)

You know, at first, not much because they weren’t in that many homes. So what I remember actually is we still cared about audience levels even before we had MSNBC and Fox on the scene. Because I remember in 1995, I think it was ‘95 when, you know, OJ became the story and was really the non-political, non-war rolling coverage event maybe of the 45 to 46 years of CNN. So for eight or nine months, virtually CNN covered one story. It always irks me when people who work with me back in the glory days of CNN think CNN these days oversees one particular story in a way that is overhyped or overdone. They forget that they were at CNN in 1995 when we did this about a murder trial at the exclusion of political news and international news and all the others.

Anyway, the trial ends and our ratings went down because people just got tired of watching our network and wanted to go just do something else. And we had this meeting, about 15 of us in the main conference room at CNN and our wonderful marketing director, brilliant woman named Wonya Lucas, who many of us know and went on to be a cable hall of famer running cable networks, walked into the room with a cardboard box. And Tom Johnson was there, other executives were there, a couple executive producers, and Wonya starts handing out T-shirts to everybody in the room.So we all put on the T-shirt and we all look around the room and everybody’s looking at each other’s T-shirt and the T-shirts say, ‘We are not the target audience.’

And CNN always kind of wanted to be respected by New York and Washington and by other experienced journalists that we all looked up to. But the audience are not experienced journalists. They’re people who are teachers and cops and bricklayers. And they want to understand the news better. And her point, so well put, was if we want to engage with an audience and have them not stand there or sit there with the remote in their hand and get tuned out whenever something came on that was not understandable to them. Well, stop doing that. You want to increase time spent viewing so back then our goal was just irrespective of the new competitors was just figuring out how to hold our audience longer and that was— from OJ through now— a continued challenge. Veterans of CNN will remember that walking through the hallways of the Atlanta headquarters, there were these massive framed posters with kind of an EKG heartbeat that had the ratings spikes whenever there were prominent stories. Fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, OJ, all that. And there was a certain pride of how spectacular the spikes could be. The problem was your business can’t survive on spikes which you have no control over. You don’t know when they’re going to come. But figuring out what to do when you didn’t have breaking news is the problem that CNN was challenged by. But still, as the years went on, whether it was MSNBC or Fox, we still found a way to do quite well and have a very successful business that was the envy of most journalistic organizations around the world

John Hashimoto (10:28)

Rick, you mentioned how important breaking news was, those breaking news moments and events. And of course, CNN famously, I believe, was one of the first to make the breaking news banner, the breaking news sound effect, if you will, kind of part of the brand, right? Do you believe that that became a crutch, that it at some point became overused in order to draw attention back to the network?

Rick Davis (10:54)

If you worked at CNN and you were in any kind of editorial meeting of key executives. The person who was a consistent complainer about the overuse of breaking news is you’re looking at him. Okay? I think and said consistently that breaking news is for when we have breaking news, not with something that happened at 11 o’clock in the morning and you’re doing a show at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and nothing materially has changed on that story. Doesn’t mean that ... breaking news doesn’t mean that it happened today and it didn’t happen yesterday. It means that it’s new in the last couple of hours and it’s significant. And when you water down— that’s a good way of putting it— because when everything is breaking news nothing is.

I don’t think anybody watches CNN more than I do who doesn’t work there anymore. And frankly, to my good friends and colleagues, former colleagues, they’re still doing it. MSNBC is doing it worse. Fox, I watch enough to know they’re not much better. It doesn’t make a difference with ratings. I’ve asked the research people, so why do it? I mean, we’re in the truth telling business. If it’s not breaking news, then you’re not telling the truth.

Bill Smee (12:33)

One other thing that I think evolved out of that, you know, the ‘90s and into the aughts, ⁓ the breaking news banner, obviously was one thing, but the sort of use of analysts and sort of pundits, if you will, on the air. And I wonder if you have any thoughts looking back on that. Well, first of all, why did that evolve and become so central? And do you think the reliance on that in some ways maybe has undermined the sort of notion that the news is the star and that people are looking for CNN to be out in the field more?

Rick Davis (13:08)

I do know why there’s a willingness to have as many analysts on the air and that has to do with you know the growth in this because people are getting news throughout the day in contrast to 40 years ago. So when you know the headlines, the people who are producing the news don’t think they need to tell you all the headlines because you’ve heard about them, but they want you to have the perspective because they know on your phone you’re not going that deep into any one story. And if you do, that’s great. They want you to, but you’re not going deep into a lot of stories. And they have informed opinion and analysts, commentators and analysts who are talking to people who really know the story behind the story. And it’s another way, at least for CNN, to get opinion on the air without having their anchors become opinion anchors like they have from time to time— certainly during the teen years, where the primetime hosts really expressed their point of view in ways they don’t do now.

I love informed debate on television. I like hearing from analysts who know more than I do. I love going to the op-ed pages of the newspapers to see what people who I agree with or I don’t agree with have to say that might change my mind about something. And when you’re just doing the headlines, you don’t get that. I would sprinkle in way more of the headlines because I don’t think everybody is reading the headlines as much as people think they are. Because they have their kids at soccer games and they have to mow their lawn and they have to go shopping and they have to do all these other things. I would do more headlines in every hour if I was king. But, you know, I’m not.

John Hashimoto (15:27)

Regarding Crossfire, clearly there were the Jon Stewart moment, which we all still remember quite well. And that is what started as a public affairs show, right, of opposing views and debate. How that was co-opted in some regards by MSNBC and Fox News and it became something else in some regards, opinion shows, masquerading as news shows, let’s say. And then lastly, the era of social media, which weaponized kind of this confrontation media, if you will, rage media even. What are your thoughts about that? Was that the natural and inevitable outcome of cable news and cable news confrontation, if you will?

Rick Davis (16:18)

Well, I think when Crossfire had... I mean, I’m a huge fan of Jon Stewart’s, but I think he was wrong about his criticism of Crossfire. Not just as somebody who worked behind the scenes. I wasn’t working on Crossfire when he criticized them. And Crossfire, every night at that time, was in front of a live audience at George Washington University. And so the atmosphere changed when it was just four people in a quiet studio and you didn’t have people clapping and cheering. And so, you know, there’s fair criticism that that brought it out to be something beyond when it was just smart talk or even the next generation of Firing Line with Bill Buckley and a guest or whatever.

To the broader question about partisanship, how it evolved, how it affected shows like that, and how we’ve gotten to basically two networks, not CNN, two cable news networks, one that has no representation from a sitting member of Congress with an R in front of their name, and another one that almost has no sitting members of Congress with a D in front of their name willing to come on those networks. And that’s not good for the public debate. Now that things have gotten so partisan, since something happened back in 2015, when Donald Trump entered the scene politically, when CNN has Trump supporters on regularly, viewers are upset, angry, and just saying, forget it, you’ve lost me. They don’t even want to hear that even though that represents a solid 40% of the American public.

I remember in the ‘90s, we had no trouble getting anybody from either side of the aisleto come on to any of the shows I was overseeing, which at one point was nine political shows. They may not have agreed with everything, but they were willing to come on. I have a letter that I’ve saved from Congressman John McCain, just wrote me a letter thanking me for inviting him on and how much he enjoys coming on Crossfire to debate the issues of the day.

Bill Smee (19:12)

I think we’re going to move now to sort of a different subject area about kind of the way the business model has changed and get some of your thoughts on that. Everyone these days is talking about challenges to the business model of journalism. And yet, as we reflect back on the ‘90s, it’s interesting to note that Ted Turner went through a series of things, a merger with Time Warner and then AOL. And now we’re sort of coming back around to talk about, I guess my question to you is, what similarities do you see from that period to today? And maybe also what’s different as you size up the state of media and journalism?

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Rick Davis (19:55)

Well, the challenge for media moguls, mini media moguls and massive media moguls is, you know, is bigger better, is bigger necessary. Can I compete without getting bigger? Am I going to be at a business disadvantage if I don’t? And the answer more often than not every five or 10 years is, yeah, I got to get bigger. Yeah, I need I need the clout from a bigger owner who has more money than we do, even though we have what would be thought of as a company making $100 million a year or $250 million, $500 million a year. But if we don’t do this, looking down the pike with our, you know, strategists who are saying, we always, you’re not managing your business unless you have a plan for where you’re going to be five years from now. And everybody said the challenges are going to be impossible for you to maintain unless we get bigger.

So that’s what started happening even with Ted in the mid-’90s when they’re trying to figure out what should our digital strategy because we know we have to have a digital strategy just like in the last five years we have to have a streaming strategy so back then was and no one really could figure out what the best digital strategy should be for Turner Broadcasting. One of the reasons why is because everybody was a broadcaster. Everybody in that room grew up being a television guy, including me. And they brought in a few strategists who would come in and financial guys and talk about it. And then I remember waking up one morning and I hear on all news radio, probably CBS all news radio do do do do do do this is CBS News Radio AOL and Time Warner are merging. And I thought, whoa. And then we so all all the news comes out about that.

What does that mean for us? What does that mean for our stock price? You know, am I suddenly rich? You know, what’s going to happen? All these things go through your mind. The point was the next monthly meeting we had with Ted, he walks into the meeting and we all stand up and cheer because he just came back from New York doing marrying the legacy media with these brilliant guys at AOL. And we were now in great shape. Our stock price was up and everybody sits down, he slaps his hand on the table and he says, you guys wanted a digital strategy? Well, I got you a digital strategy. And that was the high point of the worst media merger in the history of media. Maybe until another one came down the road that we were also involved with. You know, because everybody thought that’s all you had to do is kind of get in bed with other people who had a lot of money and kind of seem like they knew what they were doing. And so I don’t think since then, as a student of all this, I’ve seen a media merger that has worked based on the goals of what the guys who then had the press conference the next day espoused why they did it and what it’s going to accomplish.

And I think that, you know, you have to take on a lot of debt when you acquire some other company and the debt is stifling. And the debt usually means you’ve got to cut people and it creates a workplace of anxiety. But the technology means the businesses have to change. There’s no question about it for all the reasons we’ve talked about.

I do want to talk about one other aspect that affects the business, and that’s the increase in partisanship. Because, you know, it’s deep. It’s never been deeper. And it’s hard to imagine that it’s ever going to get better. That’s what’s sad about it. And I do want to point out how it really started. And to me, it really started with somebody who, for 40% of the country, loves the guy. Donald Trump even gave him, you know, the Medal of Honor or whatever it is, highest civilian medal. But Rush Limbaugh he realized that the best way to galvanize the audience was to point out who the bad guys were. And these guys were making your life miserable. And radio station owners throughout the country realized that this is a really good business. It’s cheap. You just have to put a guy in front of a microphone at 50,000 watt stations, AM stations all over America. And he begat Rush Limbaughs in every major market in the country.

Rush Limbaugh would sit in his studio from noon to three and he had a TV on from noon to three. the only thing on his TV was CNN, because like what we said, there wasn’t anything else other than game shows or soap operas. And he would see things that were going on and he would comment on it. And he’d rip CNN a new asshole about this or that and finally decided, hey, this is cool. I’m going to call them Clinton News Network. And when he called them Clinton News Network, all the other guys started calling us Clinton News Network.

All of a sudden, right-of-center conservative opinion, it was the mainstream media’s fault that your life was miserable. And we all know the trajectory that it went on when Roger Ailes, a former Republican political operative, took over the running of this network with the full support of the mega-millionaire, billionaire, Rupert Murdoch and elevated what we didn’t realize was going to happen with this other Fox station. Suddenly we had another news network criticizing anything where we would do by having somebody on the air, or maybe even if we made a little mistake, an innocent mistake, it became the subject of Bill O’Reilly’s commentary that night. Like, we were the evil empire over there, and two decades later, we had the commander in chief saying, not only are we fake news, we are the enemy of the people. We are the enemy of the people. And he points out in the crowd in every rally when he was running for president and reelection that those people out there, not just CNN, but all the other reporters are lying to you. And so we are in a situation where rightfully or wrongfully, in my opinion wrongfully, a president’s supporters, and he has a solid 40% that’s with him right or wrong, believe that we are evil.

John Hashimoto (28:15)

Let me ask you about, because all this brings us to today, right? What CNN has now had something along the lines of five different owners over its lifespan. The Ellisons and their closeness to the Trump administration is the great fear of the moment. Is that something you fear? And what does the future of CNN look like for the next five to 10 years?

Rick Davis (28:36)

Yeah, I’m just an observer. I don’t have any inside information about any of that. My greatest fear is the fear that I think other people have who work at CNN and CBS, which is you’re not going to need as many people because you don’t need five, you know, their State Department correspondent and our State Department correspondent and the State Department producer and the State Department cameraman. There are going be people who lose their jobs when this merger finally happens. The Ellisons, based on what we read, and pretty public. When you have the Secretary of Defense saying, you know, things will get better when the Ellisons take over, you know, that’s chilling.

But I’m going to take a bit of an optimistic take on it. When they take over HBO, Warner Brothers, TNT, TBS, Discovery, Animal Planet, then there’s CNN, they’re gonna have so many challenges that they have to do to make sure they look good to The Street and that they’re and I just know this from mergers. There’s so many things you have to do and they’re going to start cutting people. If they start getting, when and if they start getting involved in editorial choices, which for many journalists, that’s the scary part. All they have to do is look to see what happened to CNN’s ratings after Chris Licht tried to turn CNN a little bit in a different direction. And what has happened recently with CBS Evening News and CBS Morning News. And from a business standpoint, you have to wonder if they’re going to go down that route after they get government approval. After they get government approval. You know, I haven’t seen anybody write this, but after they don’t owe Donald Trump anything or need him from a media standpoint, whether they’re going to have to deal with Donald Trump because Oracle’s government contracts, which are massive, might start to get reduced and there’ll be some influence. Well, that will be kind of corruption that the possible, possible Democratic controlled House of Representatives and maybe even Democratic controlled Senate will start looking into which there’s none of that now for this improper influence regarding what we wouldn’t have even imagined that we’d be seeing by the government influencing who’s buying who based on their other businesses like rocket ships or cloud systems. And so by the time it gets approved, we’re going to have a new Congress, who knows what the political atmosphere is going to be. And based on the business impact of really screwing around with the veteran reporters, anchors, and particularly executives and executive producers and news managers. I just think that, you know, I might be naive about this, but I’m feeling good about the newsroom. I’m feeling bad about people who are going to lose their jobs.

Bill Smee (32:52)

Well, look, we could go on for hours. I think I want to just close with one larger question. You know, you were talking a lot about, you know, the poisoning of the discourse, you know, the polarization. All of which leads us to the question of trust and the lack of trust, I think, that has been spun out of that and what the implications are for even well-meaning journalists and journalists who take their profession seriously. I guess the question for you, and it’s a big one: Do you see a way back? Is there a way in which that trust can be restored and rebuilt.

Rick Davis (33:34)

A little bit. Once again, I’m not disparaging conservative points of view. I mean, I worked for 10 years on a show where conservatives and liberals argued every night and I worked with one of the most prominent conservatives over the last 50 years, Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak. I’m just saying when you vilify the other side, that’s what gets, you know, that’s what goes over the line for me. And to say that, you know, there’s criticism both ways, no, it’s just not. And frankly, I don’t see having a commander in chief or president who’s going to be so anti-news media, no matter who is elected and raises his or her hand on January 20th, 2029 and beyond. This kind of criticism in the news media will never, I just don’t ever see it happening again and hopefully in mine and my kids lifetime. But I could be wrong, but I don’t see it happening. And so I think it’ll come back.

I also think that the surveys of trust, and I really respect survey research people. I did some of that as part of my master’s work. The problem is you ask people, do you trust the news? Do you trust the media? People trust the media of the media they rely on. But if you ask me, do I trust the media? No, there are plenty of parts of the media I don’t trust. There’s not anybody, you, you, anybody who’s listening to this that trusts the news media because there’s so many parts of the news media that they find appalling every day when they’re just scrolling on and they don’t know what to believe and now AI is putting stories that look, and you find out you’re telling friends about something and they say, no, Bill, I saw that, that’s not real. Oh yeah, it is. No, Bill. And then we work together and goes, oh shit, I thought it was real. You know, I feel like an idiot. And so we’re competing against all that. And so when the surveys come out, sure, I don’t trust. Of course, it’s in the toilet. And this is where whether it’s the Washington Post, LA Times, CNN and others, when they start to have the hamburgers we were talking about, when they’re changing their recipe because they think they got to compete a little bit, then the people are really going to say, I’m not going there. You know what? I don’t like the other guys, so I’m going to start eating pizza and pasta. Screw it. But when you, when you don’t deliver on your promises, you’re going to lose the people that you had for a long time.

And here’s one other thing that, you know, we forget how common this is. An average person can find something that any network has done while we’ve been talking. That either through a banner or the wrong picture -- innocent mistake -- can take that, send it to somebody who has a million followers. That person may have a thousand followers. That person may have a hundred followers and send it. And within an hour, it’s being seen by millions. It’s extraordinary. That same mistake that happened in the ‘80s and the ‘90s when I was working at CNN, somebody would have to pick up a pencil, write it down on a sheet of paper, fold it up, put it in something called an envelope, seal it, and take a stamp and put it on there and send it in. And so when you say, why is the perception of this network different than it was? They’re not making more mistakes. We’re pumping out hundreds of stories a day on multiple networks, thousands of stories, banners on the screen that, you know, I was in charge of news standards and practices for 20 years. I’d be on the phone to control rooms because I knew something was not what we said when we cleared that investigative piece. And they’re innocent mistakes. Should we know better? Yes. Should we do a postmortem to find out why that person did what they shouldn’t have done? Yes. Did we do that? Yes. But it’s, it’s the merry-go-round never stops and people are working their ass off and trying to do the best they can and they’re human and they’re going to be mistakes. But the mistakes are amplified by people who are haters and the haters get scalps and they get high fives by the people who are out there.

And so to your question, is it going to change? That ...That part’s not really going to change. People feel like, hey, I’m a warrior now. I’m a warrior in this battle for ideas and about the future of the country. And I can do this to help. And this is what I’m going to do. And that’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before. And I don’t see that changing. And when you have AI thrown into the mix, you know, that’s a little depressing.

But I don’t want to end that way because I just think that at a time where we have so many important stories out there, I still think that my former network is doing a hell of a job, particularly with a story that we’re talking about in the late stages of March of 2026, covering a hugely important story that changes by the moment with experienced people behind the scenes and in front of the cameras, on digital where people are clicking like crazy and I’m proud of them and I think it’s as good as it ever was even though the old clan back who worked in the ‘80s and ‘90s think our current network isn’t worth watching anymore I think that’s bullshit.

Bill Smee (40:23)

That is a great place to end, and amen, I say to that. And also thank you for your optimism, notes of optimism amid some of the despair that I think a lot of people share. So it’s really fascinating to listen to. And I want to thank you for helping us today to trace so many of these strands.

And I want to thank everyone out there for watching and listening to Breaking the News, Deep Cut Conversations, this one with Rick Davis. If this discussion struck a chord, we hope you’ll share it. We’re also inviting you to help us bring our documentary podcast fully to life. This is an independent project built on deep reporting, archival research and interviews like this one. It’s about examining how the modern news ecosystem was built, where it fractured and what’s at stake now. Your support makes that possible. You’ll find a link below to learn more and contribute to our fundraising campaign. Every donation is tax deductible and will help us create the series and bring the story to college campuses and public forums across the country. In the weeks ahead, we’ll release additional Deep Cut Conversations, each one designed to illuminate another piece of the story. We’ll see you next time.

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A Message from the Breaking the News Producing Team

If you believe that understanding how journalism changed — and how trust was lost — is essential to rebuilding a healthier information system, we invite you to support this independent documentary project. Because the fate of CNN’s experiment is bigger than CNN. It’s about the future of reporting-based journalism and whether truth itself can survive in the media environment we live in today. If this project resonates with you, please consider becoming a supporter and helping us bring Breaking the News to life.

This conversation features Bill Burke, former senior executive at Turner Broadcasting and The Weather Channel and co-author of Call Me Ted, the bestselling biography of CNN founder Ted Turner.

Donate to Bring the Podcast to Life

Join Tom Johnson, Miles O’Brien and others in supporting this independent documentary series

Few people had a closer vantage point on Turner’s philosophy about journalism, business, and democracy, or on the moment when CNN began to transform from a rebellious outsider into a corporate media asset.

We spoke with Burke as CNN once again finds itself in a moment of upheaval: declining ratings, change in ownership, the possibility of cost-cutting and layoffs, and a media ecosystem radically different from the one Ted Turner helped invent.

The question at the center of our conversation is simple and revealing:

What would Ted think?

Bill’s answers, shaped by years working alongside Turner and later retracing his life while co-authoring the authorized biography Call Me Ted, may surprise you.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• What Ted Turner was really trying to build with CNN — Burke’s reflections on Turner’s conviction that journalism should serve democracy and why he believed “the news is the star,” not personalities or ideology.

• How CNN’s revolutionary idea — a 24-hour news network — quietly rewired the incentives of journalism, creating the pressure to stay live, fill airtime, and turn news into spectacle.

• The corporate turning point for CNN — Burke’s inside perspective on the Time Warner merger and why Turner later called it the worst decision of his business life.

• How the collapse of traditional gatekeepers reshaped the media landscape, from cable news wars to the rise of platforms, influencers, and algorithmic news distribution.

• What Ted Turner might pursue if he were a 35-year-old media entrepreneur today — Burke’s reflections on the kind of bold, disruptive idea Turner might chase in an era dominated by platforms, algorithms, and AI-driven information systems.

If you want to jump ahead, here are the chapters and time codes:

00:00 Introduction to Breaking the News

00:43 Reflections on Ted Turner’s Legacy

03:26 The Evolution of CNN and Media Ownership

07:51 The Impact of 24/7 News Cycle on Society

13:44 The Future of CNN and Media Landscape

19:43 Imagining Ted Turner in Today’s Media World

More about Bill Burke

Bill Burke occupies a rare vantage point in the story of CNN.

As a senior executive at Turner Broadcasting during the network’s formative years, Burke worked closely with Ted Turner and other key leaders as CNN evolved from a scrappy startup into a global media force. Later, Burke collaborated directly with Turner as co-author of Call Me Ted, the bestselling memoir that offers one of the most revealing portraits of the entrepreneur who built CNN and reshaped television news.

After decades in media leadership, including senior roles at Turner Broadcasting and The Weather Channel, Burke founded The Optimism Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting optimism as a driver of resilience, civic engagement, and leadership in public life. As its founder, Burke also hosts Blue Sky, a weekly podcast featuring authors, researchers, and big thinkers exploring major challenges through the lens of optimism about the future.

Leave a comment

A Message from the Breaking the News Producing Team

If you believe that understanding how journalism changed — and how trust was lost — is essential to rebuilding a healthier information system, we invite you to support this independent documentary project. Because the fate of CNN’s experiment is bigger than CNN. It’s about the future of reporting-based journalism and whether truth itself can survive in the media environment we live in today. If this project resonates with you, please consider becoming a supporter and helping us bring Breaking the News to life.

This month’s conversation features Miles O’Brien, a former CNN anchor and correspondent who has spent the past decade reporting on science, aviation, and technology as an independent journalist and filmmaker for PBS News Hour, NOVA, and Frontline.

Subscribe to Miles on Substack

We spoke with Miles in January while he was aboard a scientific research vessel in Antarctica, just miles from the Thwaites Glacier—one of the most consequential and closely watched indicators of climate change on the planet. From that literal edge of the Earth, Miles joined us to reflect not only on what science is telling us but also on what journalism must do when evidence collides with politics, polarization, and a media system built for speed and clicks rather than getting the story right.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• CNN’s decision to shut down its science unit — and what that choice revealed about the incentives, blind spots, and commercial pressures inside network television news, even as science was becoming more central to public life.

• The uphill battle Miles faced reporting independently from Antarctica, including the challenge of securing funding, institutional backing, and editorial attention for long-term, evidence-driven coverage like his reporting on the Thwaites Glacier.

• How political polarization has fed distrust not only in news media, but in science itself, undermining public confidence in expertise, evidence, and the scientific method.

• The shift from a monolithic media ecosystem to a fractured one, where audiences are now asked to judge the credibility of a vast sea of outlets, platforms, and individual creators—often without shared standards or signals of trust.

• Miles’ lifelong dream of going into space — and how reporting from Antarctica on the fate of the Earth offered a different, more sobering vantage point on humanity, science, and the stakes of getting this story right.

Miles is a rare broadcast journalist who has lived through nearly five decades of media disruption—not as an observer, but from inside the system as it reinvented itself, broke apart, and continues to reassemble in real time.

Miles was a correspondent and anchor at CNN during its meteoric years of global expansion, when the network helped define what 24-hour news could be. He also witnessed, firsthand, the limits of that model—most notably when CNN chose to shut down its science unit, a decision that revealed how vulnerable evidence-based journalism can be inside commercial television news.

When his contract at CNN was not renewed, Miles was forced to make his own way—becoming an award-winning independent journalist and filmmaker for PBS NewsHour, where he doubled down on long-form reporting at a time when much of the industry was moving in the opposite direction.

Now, as PBS faces the loss of federal funding and the ground shifts yet again beneath legacy institutions, Miles finds himself confronting the next chapter of the media story—experimenting with new models, platforms, and audiences through social networks and Substack to continue his work.

Taken together, Miles’ career traces the arc at the heart of Breaking the News: the rise of institutional authority, its erosion under economic and political pressure, and the uncertain search for new ways to report truthfully in a fractured media landscape.

If you want to jump ahead, here are the chapters and time codes:

00:00 Introduction to Breaking the News Deep Cuts

00:39 Reporting from the Thwaites Glacier

02:29 Challenges in Climate Reporting

04:23 The Evolution of Science Journalism

06:56 Trust in Media and Science

09:10 The Splintering of Science Communication

12:58 Personal Experiences with Media Distrust

13:27 The Structural Forces Affecting Media Trust

15:03 The Challenge of Speed in News Reporting

16:49 CNN’s Role in Media Fragmentation

18:31 The Threat of Content Creators and AI

20:12 Restoring Trust in Journalism

22:27 Personal Aspirations: Space vs. Climate Reporting

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In these monthly conversations, we sit down with journalists, authors, media executives, and thinkers who lived this history—and, like all of us, grappling with its consequences—to explore how the modern always-on news ecosystem was built, where it broke down, and what comes next.

Our first conversation features Lisa Napoli, former CNN journalist and the author of Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News, the definitive account of CNN’s improbable rise and enduring influence.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• The consolidation in media is a natural progression of capitalism.

• Ted Turner’s vision for CNN was not initially political but rather a business opportunity.

• CNN’s launch was chaotic and driven by the need for 24-hour news.

• The early days of CNN were characterized by scrappy innovation and a startup mentality.

• CNN’s rise to prominence was gradual and tied to the growth of cable television.

• Competition from networks like MSNBC and Fox changed CNN’s approach to news.

• The pressures of 24-hour news led to a shift towards more sensational content.

• Filling the 24/7 news cycle has always been a challenge for CNN.

• The standards of journalism have been compromised in the current media landscape.

• Future journalists should adhere to traditional journalistic values despite industry pressures.

If you want to jump ahead, here are the chapters and time codes:

00:00 Introduction to Breaking the News Podcast

01:13 Current Media Landscape and Consolidation

02:52 The Birth of CNN: A Historical Perspective

04:12 Ted Turner’s Vision and the Role of Technology

07:29 CNN’s Early Days and Startup Culture

12:52 CNN’s Challenges and Near Failures

14:22 CNN’s Rise to Prominence in the 1980s

18:02 The Impact of Competition on CNN

19:58 The Evolution of News Coverage

23:59 Reflections on CNN’s Current Challenges and Future

24:17 Lessons for Future Journalists

About Lisa Napoli

Lisa is a journalist and author whose career spans radio, television, print, and digital platforms. She is the author of Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News (Abrams, 2020), the definitive book on CNN’s creation and early years. Her other works include Radio Shangri-La, a memoir about her time helping to start Bhutan’s first youth-oriented radio station, and Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie, a group biography of the women of NPR. Napoli began her career at CNN’s New York bureau on the day the network launched, giving her a firsthand perspective on Ted Turner’s bold experiment.

Lisa serves as a series advisor for the Breaking the News podcast series.

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As we shape the narrative arc of the Breaking the News podcast series, the almost daily, fast-motion events of media disruption keep prompting us to ask the same question: Where does CNN—and the news media—go from here? Not in the abstract, but in the actual marketplace of collapsing cable bundles, declining trust, and a generational shift in how information is distributed and consumed.

What’s coming looks less like a gradual evolution and more like an unraveling, with something new struggling to take root.

For those of us who spent years in the CNN newsroom, witnessing this latest chapter is particularly painful. We’ve watched how the network Ted Turner founded with a groundbreaking mission—“to create a positive force in a world where cynics abound”—has been transformed into what one media scholar describes as a “commodified asset,” traded without much regard for its original journalistic intent.

So let me break down what’s at stake into three parts: the future of CNN, the future of TV news, and the future of journalism.

The Future of CNN: Two Scenarios, One Uncertain Path

If you want to understand the future of CNN, stop thinking like a viewer (or former staffers, like us) and start thinking like a distressed-asset banker. The network’s fate is no longer driven by editorial ambition. It’s driven by ownership instability and the macroeconomics of the media industry.

That uncertainty has taken concrete form in the past two weeks: Last week Netflix won its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming and studio assets—and within days, Paramount struck back by launching a hostile offer to take over all of WBD, including CNN.

The warring parties will now have to contend with an unpredictable president in the White House, regulators and a mountain of other legal hurdles before getting a deal across the finish line. The path ahead could take years, and numerous factors, such as an economic downturn, could derail it.

So what happens to CNN? That depends on which way the dominoes fall. Here are the two most likely scenarios:

Scenario A: Netflix wins. CNN gets spun off into a legacy cable company—a standalone business waiting to be sold. The buyers in that scenario? It could be private equity, which would probably mean aggressive cost-cutting. Or Versant, which would consolidate CNN with left-leaning MS NOW (formerly MSNBC). Or a white knight—a civic-minded billionaire who sees CNN as a public asset. Could Ted Turner be that white knight? Given his age, health, and diminished financial heft, it seems unlikely.

If no buyer emerges, CNN may have no choice but to reinvent itself as a lean, global digital news operation that relies on its own subscriptions and advertising. But the math is brutal. Audiences want niche, identity-driven media, not generalist “mainstream” news. To survive, CNN may need to shrink to grow: fewer bodies, fewer bureaus, more specialized coverage, more product thinking (prediction markets, anyone?), and less programming thinking. CNN began as a startup. It may need to become one again.

Cable revenue is collapsing faster than any realistic version of CNN’s recently launched direct-to-consumer (DTC) business can scale. To understand the magnitude of the challenge, imagine two lines moving in opposite directions: one representing cable revenue falling each year, the other representing how many paid subscribers CNN would need just to keep total revenue flat.

In our back-of-the-envelope scenario, created with the analytical help of Google’s powerful Gemini AI model, the crossover point shows the potential reality CNN is facing: Even a wildly successful DTC business would barely replace the loss of cable economics. This model shows CNN would have to attract well over 8 million paying subscribers for its digital offerings by year six, which would equate to a 68% annual growth rate in subs for six straight years. No major streaming platform has ever sustained 60–70% annual sub growth over six years, including Netflix.

Scenario B: The Netflix deal collapses, gets blocked, or Paramount’s hostile bid succeeds, raising the prospect of a merged CBS News and CNN. This is the kind of move that looks clean on a whiteboard. The new owners could consolidate resources, centralize bureaus and reduce costs. But in practice, it would be a cultural collision. CBS is still built on broadcast DNA; CNN was built for the relentless firehose of cable. Merged, the result could become the first national news superdesk or the world’s most bureaucratic newsroom. And remember, CBS is now being run by new leaders widely perceived as Trump-aligned.

The one certainty in all of this? Nothing is certain. CNN’s fate now rests mostly with regulators, lawyers, and dealmakers—not journalists.

The Future of TV News: A Format Out of Time

One thing is for sure: The TV news model that dominated the cable era is not coming back.

The economic engine—carriage fees—has been in structural decline for a decade. Cable households are collapsing. Younger audiences don’t “lean back” for news; they scroll it, swipe it, and consume it in fragments through TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, or creators they trust more than institutions.

So can a national or global TV news network still exist? Maybe. But not at its previous scale and not as a mass-market product. Expect fewer global news channels, not more. Expect a pivot from rolling coverage to “tentpole” live news moments. Expect localized reinvention experiments, maybe efforts to rebuild local TV news around community information needs rather than crime/weather/sports formulas.

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The news bundle is dissolving, and inside that dissolution lives a truth nobody wants to say out loud: TV news was a product of an era of scarcity. The internet introduced an era of infinite choice. One format replaced the other.

The Future of Journalism: Smaller, Narrower, More Personal—and Still Vital

Here’s the twist: Journalism isn’t dying. It’s fragmenting and finding new forms.

The traditional scaffolding of journalism—such as newspapers, local TV, and public media—is under immense strain. But news itself is being remade.

Nonprofit digital newsrooms. The fastest-growing segment in American local journalism is nonprofit and philanthropy-backed. The American Journalism Project (where I serve as a consultant), Report for America, local community foundations—this ecosystem has quietly become a lifeline for local accountability reporting. These organizations are lean, mission-driven, community-first, and increasingly sophisticated in product and audience strategy.

Creator-driven journalism. Platforms like Substack and YouTube represent a parallel universe where journalists and other content creators operate independently but reach millions: The Bulwark, Free Press and Crooked Media all have enormous reach. This is not a sideshow. It’s the new front door to news for people under 40.

AI-mediated journalism. Whether newsrooms embrace it or not, AI is on the path to reshaping journalism as well: personalized news digests, automated briefings, translation, verification, and niche-topic exploration. Journalism will survive, but it may become more individualized, more informal, and more specialized. The incursion of AI worries long-time media observers. Ken Auletta, who chronicled CNN and Ted Turner for decades as The New Yorker’s media correspondent, told us the stakes extend far beyond any single network.

Ken Auletta, longtime New Yorker media columnist, from our interview for Breaking the News.

So What Comes Next?

We are entering a world where CNN could be reborn, merged, or broken apart. Where TV news may shrink to a premium, live event-driven, vertical video product. Where journalism itself becomes more distributed, more entrepreneurial, and more about individual creators, as trust shifts from institutions to people.

The center may not hold. But something new is forming at the edges.

This is part of the story we expect to tell as we conclude the Breaking the News series. We hope you will support us as we bring this podcast series to life.

Listen to more clips from our interviews with Tom Johnson, Ken Auletta and other key players, read about our mission and team and consider becoming a funder.

We need your help to produce this audio documentary series. Through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor, the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), you can make a tax-deductible donation to help fund the production for the series. Your support will enable us to license archival material, conduct additional interviews, and create the immersive, sound-rich narrative that this story deserves—told with the rigor and heart of the network that inspired it.

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Remember when fake news actually meant just that – a news story that turned out to be fake?

Like those written by Stephen Glass, who fabricated stories for The New Republic before being exposed by a Forbes reporter in 1998.

Or The New York Times’ Jayson Blair, who, as his employer put it, “lied and faked and cheated his way through story after story — scores of them, for years” in the 2000s.

Or CNN, which carried hours of live, breathless coverage of a boy trapped in a helium balloon over Colorado in 2009 – only to learn it was a hoax.

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In 2016, the phrase “fake news” caught fire as social media was forced to call out scores of so-called news stories for what they were: campaigns of disinformation by Russian and other bad actors trying to influence the election.

But then Donald Trump, as he often does, found a way to turn a legitimate complaint on its head by appropriating and politicizing the term, labeling anything he didn’t like as “fake news.”

At a January 11, 2017, news conference just days before being sworn in for his first term, Trump responded to shouted questions from CNN’s Jim Acosta by pointing at him and declaring, “You’re fake news.”

Weeks later, Trump tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

He would go on to describe Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference as a hoax, as he has done so many times since with other stories that cast him in a bad light. As recently as this month, the White House launched a web page featuring what it called “media offenders,” purporting to shame outlets for coverage Trump doesn’t like.

By and large, the journalists I’ve known and worked with play fair, reporting all sides of a story and presenting the facts, sometimes with analysis. But we’ve entered a new world where even the term “fake news” doesn’t mean what it says, and facts – like statistics – can be isolated and distorted to the point where each of us might live in our own algorithmically curated news bubble.

AI only promises to make the distortion worse; just try asking ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini a question you already know the answer to, and there’s a real chance you’ll get a hallucinated response instead of the truth.

“Trust in quality-based, evidence-based information is declining all over the world,” former CNN executive Vivian Schiller told Breaking the News. “And now in a generative AI era, that’s going to become even more problematic.”

Even when seasoned editors are at the helm, they make mistakes – whether innocently or maliciously. Witness an October 2024 episode of the BBC’s Panorama program, which spliced two quotes from President Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally to make it sound like he was advocating violence at the Capitol. The BBC was forced to apologize a year later and now faces the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit from the president.

The irony is that whoever made and approved the edit didn’t have to; it may have illustrated their point, but everyone from the January 6 Commission to prosecutors had accused Trump of trying to incite an insurrection that day. Instead of just reporting the facts as they were, the BBC gave Trump more fodder for his “fake news” cannon.

“We have no foundation of truth as a country” if we can’t believe what we see and if we can’t agree on a shared reality, Schiller told us. “And when we have no foundation of truth and trust, that’s when autocracies come into power.”

The signs are worrisome: Americans’ trust in the media has fallen from 70% to 28% according to Gallup, and half say it’s hard to tell truth from fiction in the news, according to a recent survey.

Even teens don’t trust the media: When asked by the News Literacy Project to describe the news media in one word, 84% offered a negative sentiment such as “fake,” “false,” “lies,” “crazy,” chaotic,” or “wild.”

It’s this erosion of trust – sometimes self-inflicted, sometimes brought on by coordinated campaigns to weaken the media – that is at the heart of our upcoming Breaking the News podcast series.

You can listen to more clips from interviews, read about our mission, team and episodes, and consider becoming a funder. We need your help to bring this story to life.

Through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor, the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), you can make a tax-deductible donation to fund the series’ production budget.

Your support will allow us to license archival material, conduct more interviews, and craft the kind of immersive, sound-rich narrative this story deserves – told with the rigor and heart of the network that inspired it.

🎧 Learn more and support the project: Givebutter.com/BreakingTheNews

We welcome your feedback and comments. And if you like what you’re reading here, please subscribe.

It’s hardly a hot take to say most of us are addicted to our phones. A recent survey shows that Americans spend 6 hours and 35 minutes on their phones and check them 108 times a day on average.

When it comes to following the news, the infinite scroll on our smartphones is, like most unhealthy habits, a dopamine hit and a curse. On the plus side, digital technology has opened up instant access around the clock to vital information and analysis — on demand and on the terms of the individual user. And access to live coverage during major breaking news events like hurricanes and school shootings delivers vital journalism that often saves lives.

The problem with the 24-7 infinite scroll is what happens on a so-called slow news day when there are no plane crashes or other catastrophes at hand – in other words, most days. That’s when newsrooms, reporters, and content creators too often resort to either over-selling stories that don’t warrant the hype or beating a dead horse about a story of consequence without actually adding substance. The need to fill time creates an infinite scroll of … not so much. And that leaves news consumers feeling short-changed, which leads to a destabilizing corrosion of trust in the people and institutions that generate and deliver the news.

Consider the recent federal government shutdown that dragged on for a record 43 days. Hour after hour for more than six weeks, legacy and digital news outlets, podcasters, and content creators of all types faithfully cranked out updates about the impasse. These dispatches and posts amounted to: the government shutdown is still going with no end in sight. To be fair, those covering the shutdown were in a genuine bind: They had to fill airtime and their digital feeds even if there was nothing new to say or report.

This modern-day dilemma hearkens back to the early years of CNN, the first 24-7 TV news network, and it’s at the heart of our upcoming podcast series Breaking the News.

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When it was founded in 1980, the promise of CNN was simple: The news would be the star. Being first on the scene and delivering sustained up-to-the-minute live coverage was the hallmark of the network in its early years. Audiences were riveted when CNN delivered breaking news about President Reagan being shot in 1981 and the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding after takeoff in 1986. CNN also delivered comprehensive reporting on the ground when the Berlin Wall came down and when tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.

When bombs started falling over Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991, CNN was forever etched in the world’s consciousness as the destination for breaking news. But feeding the beast around the clock to fulfill that breaking news promise day after day after day was never easy. In an interview for Breaking the News, former CNN executive Vivian Schiller offers a vivid example from one of the most historic news days of the last 50 years:

Unfortunately for CNN and other news outlets, genuinely seismic global events don’t happen very often. And the downside of the “always on” news world that CNN pioneered has only grown in the last couple of decades. Technology has enabled an explosion of digital outlets for live news and information. Once upon a time, there were only three broadcast news networks. Then came CNN; then came Fox News, MSNBC and other cable news channels; then digital news platforms like AOL and MSN; then YouTube and podcasting; then Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Snap; and more recently, TikTok and Substack. There is of course opportunity in this exponential growth of news sources. Consumers can dig deep into coverage about any topic they can imagine. And independent writers and content creators are free to produce on their own, liberated from corporate gatekeepers.

But with all that comes a number of worrisome issues. “Journalism” is now practiced by anyone with an internet connection and a keyboard, smartphone, or microphone, which leads to an overload of content generated by often unverifiable sources. That reality, combined with algorithms that determine what lands in each person’s infinite scroll, means audiences are more fragmented than ever. And that opens the door to alternate facts. One person’s version of the truth is often very different from their neighbor’s. The abundance of information promised by the “always on” culture that CNN brought to life has actually undermined the health of the news ecosystem, as Schiller discussed with Breaking the News:

Of course, CNN alone cannot be blamed for the perils of today’s infinite scroll. But its launch in the summer of 1980 may have unwittingly opened a Pandora’s Box that led to the current state of chaos media. With the rise of AI and its deployment in news and content creation, things figure to get worse before they get better.

But it’s also worth remembering that journalism and the media industry have been disrupted by technology and market forces for decades and somehow have managed to survive. Examining that story in more detail to understand how we might come back from the latest brink is a lynchpin in our upcoming Breaking the News podcast.

You can listen to more clips from interviews, read about our mission, team and episodes, and consider becoming a funder. We need your help to bring this story to life.

Through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor, the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), you can make a tax-deductible donation to fund the series’ production budget.

Your support will allow us to license archival material, conduct more interviews, and craft the kind of immersive, sound-rich narrative this story deserves – told with the rigor and heart of the network that inspired it.

🎧 Learn more and support the project: Givebutter.com/BreakingTheNews

We welcome your feedback and comments. And if you like what you’re reading here, please subscribe.

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Ted Turner built CNN to last forever. “We won’t be signing off until the world ends,” he promised at launch. Forty-five years later, the network faces its fifth owner—and once again, the Trump administration is watching.

David Zaslav confirmed in October what was becoming the worst kept secret in Media-land: that Warner Bros. Discovery is actively considering a sale or breakup. The CEO revealed that “multiple parties” had expressed interest in acquiring either the entire conglomerate or pieces of it—including CNN. WBD is now officially taking bids and evaluating potential buyers who could reshape one of the world’s most influential news organizations, all with the White House watching and weighing in.

“The Warner board needs to think very seriously not just on the price competition but about which player in the suitor pool has been successful getting a deal done,” a senior Trump official told the New York Post in October, a haunting reminder of the administration’s 2018 effort to delay AT&T’s purchase of CNN’s then-parent company, Time Warner.

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For those of us who spent careers at CNN, witnessing this latest corporate convulsion is particularly painful. Turner founded the network in 1980 with a groundbreaking mission: “To act upon one’s convictions while others wait, to create a positive force in a world where cynics abound, to provide information to people when it wasn’t available before.” We’ve watched how CNN has changed into what one media scholar describes as a “commodified asset,” traded without much thought for its original journalistic intent.

This is one of the themes we will explore in our podcast series Breaking the News. To grasp how American journalism has been disrupted and diminished, it’s crucial to look at CNN’s corporate history.

The Mission

After Turner launched CNN, he ran it in a way no media executive operated before or since. He greenlit a 20-hour documentary series on the Cold War, fully aware that it would barely make a profit. He explained to his team the project was vital for CNN’s educational mission and would ultimately strengthen the brand over time. Steve and I worked on the web companion for that series, where we experienced firsthand Turner’s belief that great journalism was worth investing in, even when it didn’t garner big ratings. It was a rare moment on television and online when storytelling was the reward.

During the 1990 Gulf War, Turner instructed then-CNN President Tom Johnson to “spend whatever you think it takes” to cover the story, accepting the financial risk for thorough reporting.

“I never ran the company by the numbers,” Turner later said, reflecting on the obsession with quarterly profits that came to dominate CNN after he lost control.

That mission-driven ethos fostered a “news no matter the cost” culture. The network opened costly international bureaus even when there was no proof they helped generate ratings. This was journalism as a public service, not merely a profit center.

The First Sale: Losing the Captain

Turner’s ambitions led to his downfall. In 1986, he took over MGM Studios, which saddled Turner Broadcasting with overwhelming debt. As a result, he had to seek help from external investors, including cable operators like John Malone and the media powerhouse Time Inc., just to keep the company going. By 1996, Time Warner had acquired Turner outright.

Bill Burke, a longtime company executive who co-authored Turner’s autobiography, remembers the moment everything changed. “Jerry Levin flew out to Montana and told Ted he wanted to buy his company,” Burke told us in an interview for Breaking the News. Turner had been negotiating a joint venture with Bill Gates and Microsoft that would have allowed him to maintain control. Instead, he had to tell Gates the deal was off the table. Gates went on to form MSNBC with the Peacock Network.

Johnson, CNN’s president, told us he directly warned Turner, saying, “Ted, if you do this, you’re no longer in control.”

Turner went through with the deal, trusting Levin’s promise that he would remain as vice chairman and manage his networks. However, as Johnson pointed out, bringing the cable operators on board and then merging with Time Warner was “a mixed blessing. It tied Ted’s hands in many ways. It was no longer an environment where Ted could just do it spontaneously. He had to get permission.”

Burke notes this loss of control came “with people that he trusted and who also appreciated Ted’s genius.” Unfortunately, that trust turned out to be tragically misplaced.

The Catastrophe

The 2000 AOL-Time Warner merger, the largest and perhaps most disastrous in history, resulted in Turner’s total removal from the company. Although he was Time Warner’s biggest individual shareholder, he was kept out of crucial negotiations. Jerry Levin, who was the CEO of Time Warner at the time, only went along with the merger after AOL’s Steve Case promised him the CEO position of the newly merged company. Later, as journalist Ken Auletta recounted in an interview for Breaking the News, Levin reached out to Turner and bluntly stated, “You’re out as vice chairman.”

Burke thinks Turner’s downfall stemmed from a fatal flaw. He remarked, “Turner’s loyal to the point of being overly trusting. He just assumed, ‘Well, they like me, I like them, and we’ll do this deal, and I’ll still be able to run all these businesses.’ And once it closed, that just wasn’t the case.”

The financial fallout was immense. Turner’s stock, which was worth $10 billion at the time of the deal, plummeted to around $2 billion. However, as Burke remembers, “what really stung (for Turner) was just being out of a job and feeling like he’d been marginalized and sidelined.”

Inside the company, Burke says, “people felt like he was treated like the crazy uncle” and that the AOL team felt like it could “come in and run these networks better than Ted.”

Johnson still wonders why it happened: “Why in God’s name did Jerry Levin push Ted aside and take away from him the responsibility of overseeing everything that he had built? I asked Jerry why, and he said, ‘Tom, I will never reveal who advised me to do that.’”

The impact on CNN’s journalism was immediate. Despite the network’s profitability, it cut nearly 10% of its staff in early 2001, shedding veteran journalists and entire units, including the environmental reporting team. As Auletta reported in The New Yorker, former CNN President Rick Kaplan noted that “talk replaced news reports as cost-cutting took hold,” with the network adopting the shouty “talk radio” style that Fox and MSNBC were riding to ratings success.

Turner’s successors at AOL-Time Warner were pushing for profit growth targets reaching nearly 40% each year—figures that CNN executives felt were “unachievable without hurting the company,” Auletta reported.

The Carousel

Since the AOL disaster, CNN has gone through two more ownership changes, each stirring up new waves of turmoil.

In 2018, AT&T, the telecom giant, took over Time Warner. This marked the first time a company without any prior experience in the media industry owned CNN. Internal reports suggested executives were uneasy with CNN’s adversarial stance under Jeff Zucker during the first Trump administration.

In 2022, AT&T, in effect admitting it had made a costly mistake, spun off WarnerMedia in a merger with Discovery, leading to the creation of Warner Bros. Discovery. Shortly after taking the helm, new CEO David Zaslav made the controversial decision to shut down CNN+, a $300 million streaming venture. He then appointed Chris Licht, a veteran from NBC and CBS, as CNN’s CEO, tasking him with steering the network “back toward the center.” This corporate-driven editorial shift reached a low point with a disastrous CNN Trump town hall in May 2023. The intense backlash from viewers, journalists, and even CNN’s own staff ultimately resulted in Licht’s ousting. Former BBC and New York Times executive Mark Thompson is now at the helm.

All told, CNN has had three different CEOs since 2021.

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The financial and reputational damage speaks for itself. Multiple reports reveal that CNN’s internal valuation has plummeted by 47% over the past two years. Its revenue fell from $2.2 billion in 2021 to $1.8 billion in 2023. By 2022, operating profit had dwindled to $750 million, down from $1.08 billion in 2020. Early in 2023, TV advertising revenue saw a staggering 39% decline compared to the previous year.

Ratings too have plummeted. In late 2024, Fox News was averaging more than 3 million viewers each night, while CNN struggled to pull in under 500,000 during prime time—a staggering gap of almost 90%. CNN, which used to be the leading cable news network, now regularly finds itself in third place behind Fox and MSNBC.

To illustrate CNN’s decline—even during significant news events—here is how the network performed when voters went to the polls on November 5:

Even the symbols of CNN’s origins have disappeared. In 2021, the iconic CNN Center in Atlanta, where the network was based, was sold in a bid to save money.

The Contrast

To grasp what CNN has lost, consider two competitors with stable ownership.

The Ochs-Sulzberger family has been at the helm of The New York Times since 1896. They have sworn to uphold “the editorial independence and integrity of the newspaper and to continue it as an independent publication, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence.” This commitment to mission-driven ownership has enabled the Times to pour resources into digital transformation and high-quality journalism, even during times when such investments didn’t lead to quick profits. As a result, it stands out as one of the few newspapers thriving in the digital era.

Since its founding in 1996, the Murdoch family has controlled Fox News. Regardless of one’s views on Fox’s editorial stance, it has established a clear and consistent identity shaped by Rupert Murdoch’s vision. This stability has contributed to its position as the most valuable news media franchise globally, allowing it to maintain ratings dominance for two decades.

CNN has had no such insulation since the original sale to Time Warner in 1997. Media professor Jeff McCall notes, “Right now, you think of [CNN’s] brand as in decline.” For some, including those in the organization, it seems to have become just another business that can be retooled or exchanged for larger corporate strategies instead of being valued in its own right.

The Next Deal

Now comes sale No. 5.

In October, Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed that all options—including selling CNN or the entire company—are “on the table.”

And this is where it gets troubling: Some CNN staffers are particularly uneasy about David Ellison, the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, being one of the potential buyers. He recently bought Paramount Global and appears to be pushing CBS News into a more conservative direction, bringing in commentator Bari Weiss—who has criticized the mainstream media and left-leaning “woke” culture—to lead news ventures.

Journalists at CNN are concerned that if Ellison takes control, he might merge the CNN and CBS newsrooms, potentially leading to the end of Turner’s creation. Or he could keep the CNN brand but, they fear, alter its editorial position of political neutrality and transform it into another openly partisan platform.

An acquisition by Ellison might not be the worst possible outcome for those who value CNN. Other billionaires with clear political motives, such as Elon Musk, have also been discussed as potential suitors.

All the while, the Trump administration appears to be indicating that it could sway the outcome of the acquisition, much like it did when it postponed AT&T’s purchase in 2018. A senior official’s warning to the Warner board implies that political factors, not merely business ones, could shape CNN’s fate.

What’s On The Line?

This is more than just a business transaction. It’s about the survival of one of the few remaining major news organizations committed to straightforward journalism, especially in a time when news has turned into a commodity.

Auletta, who has closely followed CNN’s upheavals for The New Yorker, summed up the tension in his interview for Breaking the News: “Intellectually, I’m a pessimist about the future of the news business. But emotionally, I’m an optimist.”

Without CNN as a centrist voice, America would be stuck with the partisan cable extremes of Fox and MSNBC. Democracy relies on a shared understanding of facts, and CNN’s recent instability shows just how much that central tenet of journalism and civil society has deteriorated.

One CNN insider told The Wrap the network needs a stable owner who will “let CNN fulfill its digital ambitions and [respect its] expertise in international reporting”—essentially, someone willing to treat CNN as a journalistic mission, not just a tradable asset. Someone in the mold of Ted Turner.

Turner built CNN to inform and unite the world. The tragedy is that CNN has become collateral damage in deals driven by other priorities—entertainment assets, media-telecom synergies, and streaming strategies. With each transaction, the network has strayed further from Turner’s founding mission, treated by its merry-go-round of owners as just another revenue stream rather than a crown jewel.

Now, as CNN contends with the prospect of another transaction, the network confronts an existential question: Will it end up in the hands of someone who values its journalistic purpose, or with a buyer who sees the network merely as a cash cow—or, worse, a once-treasured journalism organization to be remade for political ends?

Listen to more clips from interviews with Turner, Johnson and others, read about our mission, team and episodes, and consider becoming a funder. We need your help to bring this story to life. Through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor, the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), you can make a tax-deductible donation to fund the series’ production budget.

Your support will allow us to license archival material, conduct more interviews, and craft the kind of immersive, sound-rich narrative this story deserves—told with the rigor and heart of the network that inspired it.

We welcome your feedback and comments. And if you like what you’re reading here, please subscribe.

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Trust in the media is at its lowest point since Gallup started keeping track in the era of Watergate. Back then, about 70% of Americans said they had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in traditional news outlets.

Today, that number is 28% percent – the first time it has been below 30%. In 2020, it was 40%.

Meanwhile, cable news and especially social media are over-representing extreme political views on both the left and right compared to traditional media, according to various studies cited in a recent Financial Times analysis.

And half of Americans say it’s hard to tell truth from fiction in the news, a new Pew Research Center survey found. Most say they come across news they think is inaccurate.

The loss of trust, signs of polarization, and the erosion of believability are among the chief topics we will be probing in Breaking the News, a documentary podcast series looking at the birth of chaos media through the rise and decline of CNN.

Ted Turner wanted the news to be the star at his brainchild. In an interview conducted for Breaking the News, former CNN President Tom Johnson recalls that when he asked Turner for his marching orders, the CNN founder told him: “Be fair. That’s it, pal.”

Johnson and other former executives told us Turner launched CNN with the best of intentions. But by creating the first 24-7 TV news network 45 years ago – by disrupting the stranglehold the big three networks held over the nightly news – Turner unwittingly unleashed forces that would lead to CNN’s own struggles and disruption.

Who today remembers, in this era of “pundits in boxes,” that CNN invented the genre of televised confrontation in 1982 with Crossfire?

Not too long after that, the Reagan Administration did away with the Fairness Doctrine, paving the way for partisan broadcasting and Rush Limbaugh’s rise in talk radio. Less than a decade later saw the birth of Fox News and MSNBC, and the cable news universe began to splinter.

Turner had already considered and dismissed the idea of turning CNN’s sister network Headline News into a more right-wing channel. And both Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates had approached Turner about selling or partnering with CNN before he ultimately chose TimeWarner.

Turner once went skiing with Murdoch after researching his rival, he told Ken Auletta in a series of never-before-heard interviews the New Yorker writer made available to Breaking the News. In them, Turner described Murdoch as “a very dangerous person … dripping with charisma” – not unlike Hitler:

CNN, built on the promise of fairness, suddenly found itself caught in the crossfire of ideological warfare. As it tried to referee a fractured public with outdated rules and “both sides” journalism, CNN lost the trust of viewers across the spectrum. Ratings and revenues suffered.

“Stop hurting America,” Jon Stewart famously scolded Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. “You’re doing theater when you should be doing debate. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.”

How CNN went from “just the facts” to a victim of its own success – and what that journey says about the news media ecosystem today – is at the core of our podcast series.

As former Turner and CNN executive Wonya Lucas told us, the polarization of news wasn’t the original intent:

Listen to more clips from interviews with Turner, Johson and others, read about our mission, team and episodes, and consider becoming a funder. We need your help to bring this story to life.

Through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor, the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), you can make a tax-deductible donation to fund the series’ production budget.

Donate to Bring This Story to Life

Your support will allow us to license archival material, conduct more interviews, and craft the kind of immersive, sound-rich narrative this story deserves – told with the rigor and heart of the network that inspired it.

We welcome your feedback and comments. And if you like what you’re reading here, please subscribe.

These days we take it for granted. When news breaks anywhere in the world, we can get live updates in real time – on news websites, cable channels, Twitter, YouTube, Threads, TikTok, and a raft of other social media platforms.

Instantly available video and images transport us to war zones like Gaza and Ukraine and to the sites of hurricanes, natural disasters, and crimes, often delivering powerful immersive snapshots that help us make sense of high-stakes events shaping our world.

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That’s the promise of live breaking news, and that promise was the bedrock of CNN when it was founded 45 years ago. But the 24-7 global live news coverage that CNN pioneered and perfected also set us on a course for the much-lamented infinite scroll of our current media landscape.

We now live in an always-on world where the theoretical promise of live breaking news has been undermined and obscured by the slop. Too much information coming at us from too many directions has enabled the runaway growth of alternate facts, misinformation, and disinformation.

This is a big part of the story we are telling in our upcoming podcast series, Breaking the News, which explores how a revolution in live news ultimately gave birth to chaos media. At the center of this is the story of CNN itself.

🎧 You can listen to audio samples and learn more about our series at: breakingthenews.org.

Launched in June 1980 by Ted Turner, CNN went on to become the place to see live breaking news from around the world in real time. Before CNN, news consumers almost never saw events unfold live on television; they saw edited clips each evening on network newscasts, heard about it on radio broadcasts, or waited for the daily paper to hit their doorsteps the next morning.

CNN changed all that. And when major news broke, CNN deployed reporters and crews into the field and delivered live feeds so the whole world could watch.

From the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986 and the first Gulf War to democracy uprisings in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall, CNN provided a birds-eye view and insightful reporting. In an interview for our series, former CNN President Tom Johnson said this type of coverage was only possible because Turner was committed to a “whatever it takes” approach. Johnson, who has just published a new memoir about his career in public service and the news industry, calls Turner a savant.

During its early years, CNN expanded operations around the world, but its hold on news audiences ultimately was not sustainable. When CNN went on the air in 1980, it was a direct threat to the three main broadcast TV networks who were the gatekeepers of news; 15 years later CNN was the one being disrupted.

Fox News and MSNBC went on the air in the mid-’90s, and AOL, Yahoo!, and others capitalized on the internet as a source of news and information. That would fundamentally change not only CNN but the entire news media ecosystem. With the explosion of new sources of information, audiences fragmented and picked sides, leaving truth itself up for debate.

We’re developing Breaking the News through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor, the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), which allows us to accept tax-deductible donations to fund the series’ production budget. Your support will help us license archival material, conduct new interviews, and craft the kind of immersive, sound-rich narrative this story deserves – told with the rigor and heart of the network that inspired it.

🎧 Learn more and support the project: Givebutter.com/BreakingTheNews

We welcome your feedback and comments. And if you like what you’re reading here, please subscribe.

The five-alarm fire signals are everywhere. A recent Gallup poll shows trust in the news media is at an all-time low. Newspapers continue to downsize and fold. News networks are being sold or spun off in the face of a broken business model. And truth itself – or at least an agreed-upon version of reality – is at risk, with potentially existential consequences for democracy.

How exactly did we get to this point, and is there an escape route from the relentless churn of chaos media? It turns out a lot can be learned by examining the life story of one of the biggest players in the modern news industrial complex, CNN. That’s the story we plan to tell in a new, serial narrative podcast.

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Breaking the News will explore how Ted Turner’s launch of CNN as the first 24-7 TV news network unwittingly unleashed the forces that have led to the splintering and decline of news media and the loss of trust that now threatens to undermine civil society in the U.S. and around the world. The podcast will feature former executives and insiders, including a newly unearthed wide-ranging Ted Turner interview done by New Yorker writer Ken Auletta:

For us, this story hits close to home. We are former CNN journalists who spent decades inside the network that helped define modern news. We watched firsthand as the 24-hour news revolution transformed how the world got its information, and how technology and storytelling collided to recast the news media landscape for better and for worse.

When Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980, he fundamentally changed the news business. For decades, the “Big Three” networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — delivered half-hour evening broadcasts, radio stations produced news on the hour, and newspapers delivered updates once a day. That was it. Turner’s idea was simple, yet radical: live news, all the time. And according to longtime Turner executive Bill Burke, Ted was the one with the guts to see it through.

And it caught on. For a generation, CNN was the place to watch history unfold in real time: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the first Gulf War to 9/11; from contested presidential elections to natural disasters. At its peak, CNN became a sort of global town square, with millions of people tuning in together to the same feed, the same facts.

But the very disruption CNN unleashed would eventually lead to its own decline and permanently alter the news ecosystem and our relationship to the truth.

CNN capitalized on technology to reach audiences around the world, but technology also lowered the barriers to entry for everyone else.. The proliferation of cable channels accelerated audience fragmentation. Then came the internet, and “always-on” was no longer unique to CNN or any cable network. Instead of a single channel commanding mass audiences, dozens (then hundreds, then thousands) of outlets — large and small, professional and amateur — competed for slivers of attention.

As audiences atomized, the economics of the news business crumbled. Advertising dollars flowed to digital platforms. Cable subscriptions shrank as streaming services expanded. CNN and the broader media industry were built on the assumption that scale was everything, but that assumption no longer holds. As new sources of information multiply on YouTube, TikTok, and podcasting platforms, there is a paradox: We have more information than ever but less agreement about what’s true.

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Which is why we are so energized to produce Breaking the News. This isn’t a nostalgia project. It’s an urgent story about how we got from James Earl Jones intoning, “This is CNN,” to Donald Trump declaring, “You are fake news.”

Each episode revisits a turning point. From Ted Turner’s original vision to the corporate mergers that changed the DNA of journalism, from the digital revolution to the algorithmic chaos of social media. We’re blending rich archival audio, new interviews, and the unfiltered voices of those who lived it — inside CNN and beyond.

To bring this project to life, we’ve enlisted a trio of notable advisors: Chris Turpin, former NPR editorial leader; Lisa Napoli, author of Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News; and Ian Coss, Peabody Award–winning podcast creator and host at WGBH in Boston.

We’ve already conducted hours of interviews with insiders and key players, including former CNN President Tom Johnson, former CNN (and NYT/NPR/Twitter) executive Vivian Schiller, CNN original Ted Kavanau, and journalist Ken Auletta, who chronicled CNN’s rise and corporate turmoil for The New Yorker. But we are still in the early stages and looking to the public for financial support.

🎧 Listen to audio samples and learn more about the series at breakingthenews.org.

We’re developing Breaking the News through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor, the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), which allows us to accept tax-deductible donations to fund the series’ production budget. Your support will help us license archival material, conduct new interviews, and craft the kind of immersive, sound-rich narrative this story deserves — told with the rigor and heart of the network that inspired it.

To support the project, visit: Givebutter.com/BreakingTheNews

Why now? Because the crisis of trust in the media is bigger than any one network. It’s a mirror of a deeper crisis in democracy itself — the loss of a shared understanding of what’s true. We believe this story — told from the inside, by people who were there — can help us reckon with how we got here and where we go next.

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We welcome your support and feedback and plan frequent dispatches and behind-the-scenes updates in the weeks ahead.