14 DAY TRIAL // When Ted Turner and his Cable News Network launched CNN in 1980, he made one solemn promise to all the staff and, implicitly, the world it would cater around the clock information to: they would remain on air until the end of time.
Because that was Turner’s most honest intention, he even decided how CNN would go out on the day the world ended: with a song that would be their last-ever broadcast. That video that Turner prepared, and which has been subject of rumors for decades, has finally leaked.
Doomsday video is out
Jalopnik writer Michael Ballaban, a former CNN intern, stumbled upon it by chance, on a day he remembered this doomsday video myth and decided to see for himself if there was any truth to it by looking for it in their database.
He found it easily, hence his surprise that no one else tried to do the same and thus confirm rumors that had been making the rounds for such a long time.
It was labeled “HFR [hold for release] till the end of the world confirmed” in angry red font, and came in standard definition with 4:3 aspect ratio, which is confirmation that Turner didn’t lie when he said he had everything planned for CNN’s last broadcast.
Though the existence of this video became somewhat of a myth in the media, this is the first time that it’s actually out. You will find it embedded below.
“We will cover the end of the world, live”
When CNN launched, Turner’s now-bombastic-sounding speech went something like this, Ballaban writes: “We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event. We'll play the National Anthem only one time, on the first of June [the day CNN launched], and when the end of the world comes, we'll play ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ before we sign off.”
And indeed, the footage sees a marching band made up of members of the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marine, in front of the Turner Mansion, playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” which is also the last song the band on the Titanic played as the biggest ship known to mankind until then was sinking.
The parallel is heart-warming in its naivety: Turner wanted to be there as this Titanic of a planet of ours went down, and he wanted CNN to be the marching band, standing proud, tall and on duty. That, of course, was the plan in a time when CNN still waited for confirmation of an event before reporting on it or, as Ballaban says, before the network was brought to its knees in its journalistic journey by the need for speed for (mis)information.
The former CNN intern doesn’t say what Turner thought would bring about the end of the world or how they would get said confirmation that doomsday was actually here, but there’s something profoundly touching about his mission of being there, “live” to give a soundtrack to whatever it was that would destroy us. And about his assumption that humanity would pause from dying for one last, dignified goodbye.