As with many of the previous chapters in this book, predictions about
the future of journalism begin in the past – in this case, 1 June, 1980,
when Ted Turner presented an inaugural address on his new channel,
Cable News Network, that included lines adapted from a poem written
by the Director of the Woolf Institute, Ed Kessler:
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,
To offer those who want it choice,
For the American people, whose thirst for understanding and a
better life has made this venture possible,
For the cable industry, whose pioneering spirit caused this great
step forward in communication,
And for those employees of Turner Broadcasting, whose total
commitment to their company has brought us together today,
I dedicate the News Channel for America,
The Cable News Company.
1
CNN, as it is better known, grew out of Turner’s independent station in Georgia, WTBS, and displayed a grandiloquent sense of its
own self- importance from the start but, as Küng-Shankleman has
observed, there was something quite visionary in CNN’s original
mission to reinvent the news. Until the mid-1990s, the intensely competitive broadcast news industry in the United States did not consider
cable to be a major challenge, and so for 15 years, CNN had “the
field of 24-hour international news coverage to itself”.
2
By the end
of the nineties, however, a number of competitors had entered the
field, including the Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and BBC World, all
of which offered 24-hour services. In 2000, the number of Internet
users had grown to just over 350 million from 16 million in 1995 – a
remarkable increase but still less than 6 per cent of the global population, with approximately 40 per cent of Americans able to access
Conclusion
The Future of Journalism