However, success did not come overnight. Launched in June 1980 by the then-tiny Turner Broadcasting of Atlanta, Georgia, in the beginning CNN (mocked as the “Chicken Noodle Network”) accumulated losses at the rate of $2 million a month. Ted Turner transferred earnings from his highly profitable superstation TBS and slowly built a first-rate news organization. CNN set up bureaus across the United States and then around the world, beginning with Rome and London. Yet, at first Turner and his executives were not positive they would survive the stiff competition from rival Satellite News Channel (SNC), a joint venture of Group W Westinghouse and ABC. In January 1982, Turner let Satellite News Channel know he was serious and initiated a second CNN service, “Headline News.” Through 1982 and most of 1983, CNN battled SNC. In October 1983, ABC and Westinghouse gave up and sold their news venture to Turner for $25 million, ending for a time effective competition for CNN in the United States.

CNN then took off. By 1985 it was reaching in excess of 30 million homes in the United States and had claimed its first profit. Turner added bureaus in Bonn, Moscow, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. Also, in the years before Court TV, CNN was the sole channel to televise celebrated trials such as the murder case against Claus von Bulow. In 1987, when President Ronald Reagan met Soviet premier Mikhail S. Gorbachev at a summit that would signal the end of the Cold War, CNN was on the air continuously with some 17 correspondents on-site. By 1989 CNN had 1,600 employees and an annual budget of about $150 million, and the channel was available in 65 countries with such specialized segments as a daily entertainment report, Show Biz Today, and a nightly evening newscast, The World Today. Larry King had moved his interview show to CNN and become famous for attracting ambitious politicians and infamous celebrities. In 1991, as the only TV network in the world operating live from the very beginning of Operation Desert Storm, CNN reported everything the military permitted—from the first bombing of Baghdad to the tank blitz that ended the conflict. Indeed, at a press conference after the initial air bombing runs by the U.S. Air Force, Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney and General Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted that they were getting much of their war information from CNN.

However, the fame of CNN’s Gulf War coverage did not translate into corporate fortune, for the cost of covering a wide-ranging set of battles had risen faster than advertising revenues. The peak in viewership came on the night of the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, when CNN captured 11 percent of the audience, as compared with the channel’s usual 1 to 2 percent audience shares. Advertising time had already been sold.

As the late 1980s and early 1990s provided regular disasters, wars, and “media events,” CNN enjoyed surges in interest and ratings. Viewers turned to the station to watch the confrontations at Tiananmen Square, the calamities of the San Francisco earthquake, and the long-awaited announcement of the verdict in O.J. Simpson’s “trial of the century.”

Whatever the news mix, CNN’s prestige continued to grow. It became a basic component of how the new global village communicated. When U.S. troops invaded Panama in 1989, the Soviet foreign ministry’s first call did not go to its counterpart in the U.S. diplomatic corps, but to the Moscow bureau of CNN, offering a statement condemning the action that could be read on camera. Turner proudly told anyone who would listen that Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Nancy Reagan, and Fidel Castro had all declared themselves faithful viewers of CNN.

However, as CNN moved well past 50 million households reached in the United States (and millions more abroad), all was not calm inside the organization. Staff members began to grumble about low wages and pressure not to unionize. Furthermore, by the early 1990s, Turner seemed to lose his innovative magic. In 1992 he heralded and launched an “Airport Channel” and a “Supermarket Channel,” but neither added much in the way of new audience or profits. Also, as CNN reached more of the world, indigenous local news organizations began to publicly label Turner a “cultural imperialist.”

Yet there was no doubt that, as CNN turned 15 in June 1995, it had surely become a prosperous and important part of the new world of cable television. CNN’s yearly revenues neared $1 billion, but growth stalled as advertisers concluded that the CNN audience was “too old” and “not as affluent” as could be found elsewhere.

The year 1995 was an especially eventful one. First, Turner sold his complete operation, including CNN, to media giant Time Warner, leading skeptics to grumble that a serious news organization would have difficulty functioning as part of such a corporate colossus. At the end of the year, Microsoft announced it would ally with NBC to form MSNBC to challenge CNN directly. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Inc., and Capital Cities/ABC also promised future 24-hour news services to contest CNN around the world.

In the late 1990s, the competitors MSNBC and FOX News (the latter owned by News Corporation) began to affect the fortunes at CNN. It stalled and seemed less innovative than its younger competitors. Thus, as Time Warner merged with America Online to form AOL Time Warner (the merger was announced in January 2000 but not formally approved and executed until January 2001), CNN began a series of radical changes. In March 2001, AOL Time Warner hired Hollywood veteran Jamie Kellner to supervise all Turner networks, including CNN’s various editions. Kellner fired 400 employees, including the longtime symbol of CNN Headline News, Lynn Russell, bringing in actress Andrea Thompson, formerly of NYPD Blue, to replace her. Headline News’s image suddenly came to look more like an Internet screen than a traditional anchored news service. Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine, replaced longtime CNN president Rick Kaplan as head of the CNN division with its two U.S. news services, 14 other international and satellite news services, and a dozen CNN-related Internet sites. The executive shuffle continued at CNN with Isaacson’s departure in early 2003 to head the Aspen Institute. Kellner soon followed, returning to Los Angeles and the WB television network, where he announced a retirement to be effective early in 2004. Isaacson’s replacement, Jim Walton, former head of the CNN News Group, a veteran in the organization, oversaw cancellation of the Connie Chung Show and the creation of Anderson Cooper 360°, a news and commentary program that continues to draw viewers in 2004. In late 2003, Walton replaced Teya Ryan, executive vice president and general manager of CNN/U.S., with Princell Hair, a former vice president for Viacom Television’s television station group, with primary responsibility for local news.

All these shifts and changes occurred in the context of continuing competition among 24-hour news services in which FOX News regularly drew more viewers than CNN. A new era had begun, with all three of the all-news cable networks battling for preeminence. Even though each of the competitors was backed by a wealthy media corporation, it was not clear that all three would survive.