As a 24-hour news channel, CNN never had a need for an end-of-the-day broadcast video. It planned to just keep going until the Apocalypse. “When the end of the world comes,” founder Ted Turner once said “we’ll play ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ before we sign off.” To make good on that promise, he famously made a tape that would only be run right before the end of the world – a doomsday video that would be the station’s final goodbye.
Watch it below.
“Normally, when a TV station begins and ends the broadcast day, it signs on and off by playing the national anthem. But with CNN — a 24-hour-a-day channel — we would only sign off once, and I knew what that would mean. So we got the combined Armed Forces marching bands together — the Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force bands — and took them out to the old CNN headquarters, and we had them practice the national anthem for a videotaping. Then, as things cranked up, I asked if they’d play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ to put on videotape just in case the world ever came to an end. That would be the last thing CNN played before we — before we signed off.”
Via The Verge:
Jalopnik writer Michael Ballaban has posted a grainy, minute-long video that he says he unearthed in 2009 while interning for Wolf Blitzer at The Situation Room, under the simple name “Turner Doomsday Video” (as seen in the screenshot above.) Formatted for standard-definition 4:3 television, it would make a bizarre sight today — although we might, obviously, be too busy with the end of days to notice.
The very idea of a final apocalypse tape, in fact, seems strange now, and not just because CNN’s fortunes have declined since the 1980s. It’s not really clear how you would ever “hold for release till end of the world confirmed,” as the screenshot says. But Turner created the video against the backdrop of potential nuclear war, when it seemed at least possible that our weapons could genuinely obliterate Earth as we knew it. But with the Cold War long over, what disaster would be so final that we’d give up hope of ever seeing news again? Our imagined apocalypses are creeping environmental disasters and mass plagues, slow and drawn-out deaths. And as for CNN? Well, Ballaban gives us his take on its own protracted apocalypse.
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