Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 7, 1990                   TAG: 9006070020
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PHIL KLOER COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: ATLANTA                                LENGTH: Long

AFTER 10 YEARS, THE LAUGH'S NO LONGER ON CNN

That same year, Ted Turner was an even more obscure 26-year-old running an Atlanta-based billboard advertising company, a highly unlikely candidate to turn McLuhan's idea into reality.

But that's what Turner eventually did with Cable News Network. The all-news channel went on the air at 6 p.m. June 1, 1980, with Turner saying, "I guess we are on the air. I hope so."

In the beginning, CNN was anything but global. It went out to a mere 1.7 million households, all of them in the United States. Viewership was too small to measure, as was its influence.

But through a series of savvy deals, CNN now encompasses the globe like no other entity in history, beaming its signal via a five-satellite linkup to 92 countries on every continent except Antarctica.

"Its impact globally cannot be overstated," says Barry Sherman, associate director of the prestigious Peabody Awards. CNN has won three such awards in its first decade.

"In my travels to many nations, I find that CNN is the primary source for international TV news," said former President Jimmy Carter. "Political and other leaders all watch it regularly."

From Reykjavik, where it's dubbed into Icelandic, to CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., where it's monitored during crises and sometimes videotaped by senior officials, hundreds of thousands of people watch the network. And many of them are world leaders.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, who years ago refused to be interviewed for CNN because she thought any American cable network was probably pornographic, now watches regularly at 10 Downing St.

"Once [King] Hussein [of Jordan] was in London at his dentist's office and he was very upset with a report on CNN," recalls Bernard Shaw, a top CNN anchor. "He made an overseas phone call from his dentist's office and claimed that his position was being misstated.

"I said if you would like to react to that, we will put you on the air. And within an hour of that phone call, Hussein came up on `The International Hour.' "

Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa has worn a CNN T-shirt during news conferences, and Fidel Castro has stated publicly that he watches the network.

CNN's audience is one of quality rather than quantity, however. Forty percent of the homes in the United States don't even get CNN because they are not wired for cable. At any given moment in its 24-hour cycle, only about 400,000 U.S. households are tuned in (major events sometimes attract a little more than 1 million), compared with the millions who watch even the lowest-rated network show.

Worldwide ratings figures do not exist, but CNN is available in about 6 million homes outside the United States.

In addition, CNN has become what ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings calls "a visual wire service," supplementing the main print wire service, The Associated Press.

"I first saw CNN about 10 years ago," Jennings recalls. "I came home on a vacation when I was living in London and I saw CNN on the air and I phoned [ABC executives in New York] and I said, this CNN is terrific.

"And they all said, `Nahhhh.' "

That "nahhhh" eventually came back in the faces of virtually everyone in broadcast news, according to the Peabody Awards' Sherman. When CNN came along doing more than network news on a fraction of the budget, it made the corporations that own the news divisions wonder if they should cut costs, too.

And in the late 1980s, they did cut, laying off staff members and closing bureaus, leading to what Dr. Sherman calls an "overall diminishment of the quality of broadcast news."

The future of CNN probably will not be as exciting as the past, Turner said at CNN's 10th anniversary party recently.

According to vice president Ed Turner (no relation to Ted), that future includes:

"Concentrating on the ever-expanding ability to go live where the news is" by using "fly-away uplinks," portable satellite dishes such as the one CNN used to broadcast the Tiananmen Square protests last year.

A new emphasis on investigative reporting, as exemplified by the newly created "CNN Special Assignment." CNN is generally credited with outstanding coverage of breaking news, but still lagging behind the three broadcast networks in investigative work.

An "increase in our international coverage and the continued add-on of international bureaus." CNN's 17th international bureau will open soon in Berlin.

"The [news] action is going to be international," Turner says. "A lot of it is going to be Third World, simply because the population is so young and that's where the revolutionaries come from."

Ten years ago, the revolutionaries - hungry young journalists, few of whom had any big-league experience - came to Atlanta to light a video campfire that would never go out. Now they are the establishment, covering other revolutionaries.

And the campfire will never go out, at least not until the end of the world. And Turner even has a plan for that:

CNN will announce it, and then a tape will roll of a military band playing "Nearer My God to Thee."