Shaw, known for his live-from-Bagdhad reporting during the Gulf War, became CNN's chief anchor until his retirement in 2001. The Gulf War coverage brought CNN some much sought-after legitimacy, and made household names of previously obscure reporters. Despite the lack of live pictures, CNN's coverage was carried by television stations and networks around the world, resulting in CNN being watched by over a billion viewers worldwide. Murrow's live radio reports of the German bombing of London during World War II. Unable to immediately broadcast live pictures from Baghdad, CNN's coverage of the initial hours of the Gulf War had the dramatic feel of a radio broadcast – and was compared to CBS news anchor Edward R. We're seeing bright flashes going off all over the sky. The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated. Let's describe to our viewers what we're seeing. The moment when bombing began was announced on CNN by Shaw on January 16, 1991, as follows: Operation Desert Storm as captured live on a CNN night vision camera with reporters narrating The Gulf War in 1990–1991 was a watershed event for CNN that catapulted the channel past the " Big Three" American networks in viewership for the first time in its history, largely due to an unprecedented, historical scoop: CNN was the only news outlet with the ability to communicate from inside Iraq during the initial hours of the Coalition bombing campaign, with live reports from the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad by reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett. The management announced that CNN+ would be closed on December 31, 2010. It went off the air at the end of December 28, 2010. The channel, which later became known as CNN Headline News and is now known as simply HLN, eventually focused on live news coverage supplemented by personality-based programs during the evening and primetime hours.ĬNN+ (CNN Plus) was a Spanish language 24-hour television news channel that was launched in 1999 as a joint venture by Sogecable and Turner Broadcasting. Ī companion channel, CNN2, was launched on Janu and featured a continuous 24-hour cycle of 30-minute news broadcasts. The channel's success made a bona-fide mogul of founder Ted Turner and set the stage for conglomerate Time Warner's eventual acquisition of the Turner Broadcasting System in 1996. The company has 42 bureaus (11 domestic, 31 international), more than 900 affiliated local stations (which also receive news and features content via the video newswire service CNN Newsource), and several regional and foreign-language networks around the world. Since its debut, CNN has expanded its reach to a number of cable and satellite television providers, several websites, and specialized closed-circuit channels (such as CNN Airport). The American version, sometimes referred to as CNN (US), is also available in Canada, some islands of the Caribbean and in Japan, where it was first broadcast on CNNj in 2003, with simultaneous translation in Japanese. Globally, CNN programming has aired through CNN International, seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories since May 2019, however, the US domestic version has absorbed international news coverage in order to reduce programming costs. CNN claims to be "The Most Trusted Name in News", but its efforts to be nonpartisan have led to accusations of false balance. The network is known for its dramatic live coverage of breaking news, some of which has drawn criticism as overly sensationalistic. While CNN ranked 14th among all basic cable networks in 2019, it was up to number 11 in 2021. According to Nielsen, in June 2021 CNN ranked third in viewership among cable news networks, behind Fox News and MSNBC, averaging 580,000 viewers throughout the day, down 49% from a year earlier, amid sharp declines in viewers across all cable news networks. Īs of September 2018, CNN had 90.1 million television households as subscribers (97.7% of households with cable). Upon its launch in 1980, CNN was the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage and the first all-news television channel in the United States.
It was founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel. It is owned by CNN Global, which is part of Warner Bros. The Cable News Network ( CNN) is a multinational news-based pay television channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.