The End of the World as He Knew It

Before Ted Turner created a world of endless news, he imagined how the news would end. In 1980, in the run-up to the launch of CNN—in the days when 24-hour news cycle was a pipe dream, and something of a joke—the future mogul commissioned a segment to be aired in the case of environmental disaster, nuclear holocaust, or a similar Armageddon. CNN’s “doomsday video,” as it is commonly known, has existed, over the years, less as a piece of content than as a piece of lore, a production first rumored and then leaked and now existing, for the most part, as a series of grainy screenshots and short clips.Its main feature, though, is a soundtrack—a military band playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” in a purposeful callback to the musicians of the Titanic who chose, in their final moments, the melody’s quiet dignity. The segment suggests resignation: The network, too, is prepared to go down with the ship. It is also insistent, and a bit cocky. It assumes that humanity will end not with a bang or a whimper, but with one last spectacle, offered up by CNN.Turner died yesterday at the age of 87, having found a form of vindication: His vision became an empire. He was an icon in a classically American mold—an industrialist in the manner of Andrew Carnegie, a showman in the manner of P. T. Barnum. And the doomsday tape is a testament to his place in that firmament. CNN would be so enduring that it would pay witness to the very last, turning the ultimate breaking-news story into a eulogy for civilization itself. Confronting apocalypse, the network would also make it telegenic. “We will cover the end of the world, live,” Turner said at the time, a brash promise that, in hindsight, could be read as an omen.[Read: The new age of performance anxiety]Today, 24-hour news cycle is nearly a slur, a metonym for a media environment that prizes the outrageous and the merely outraged. But Turner founded CNN as a civic ideal: American democracy, propelled forward by constant information. Reliably con