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Zippyjuan
01-06-2015, 05:32 PM
Just in case you aren't around to see it here is a preview.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwvHJ7Zhxwo

http://jalopnik.com/this-is-the-video-cnn-will-play-when-the-world-ends-1677511538


Thirty-four years ago, at the launch of Ted Turner's Cable News Network, the founder made a grandiose and specific promise about his newly created round-the-clock operation. "Barring satellite problems, we won't be signing off until the world ends," Turner declared. And in anticipation, he prepared a final video segment for the apocalypse:


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.
People thought he was joking. We have proof, acquired from a source, that he wasn't. Below is the never-before-seen video the last living CNN employee will be required to play before succumbing to radiation poisoning, the plague, zombies, or whatever crazy end Turner saw coming.

It lives on CNN's MIRA archive system, under the name TURNER DOOMSDAY VIDEO. Reflecting its status as an artifact, not to be used except in the ultimate emergency, it's in standard definition, with an aspect ratio of 4:3, perfect for the cathode-ray tube televisions of the 1980s.1


The video has already outlasted Ted Turner's ownership and the rise and fall of AOL. If it has not yet had the chance to serve as the capstone of all human experience, it nevertheless stands as a quiet monument to the globe-girdling ambitions behind CNN.

CNN may be the human centipede of journalism at this point, its bloated corpse stumbling through the supposed middle ground of the wasteland that is American cable news, but it wasn't always that way. It was founded almost as an ideal, and much of the media world owes its very nature to the first cable news network.

Before CNN, a regular person could absorb the news only in restricted doses, at specific times of day. Turner's innovation was in the idea of news without boundaries, night into day into night again, allowing anyone to be an obsessive media nut, every single second of every single minute of every day.

From 1980 on, news would always be there for you, right until the very end. At its birth, the now-moribund news giant operated like many of the new media organizations of today—hiring young people with little experience and plenty of drive, people who wanted the breathing space to explore every story that couldn't fit into a 30-minute news segment.

Since those early years, CNN has grown into a ponderous object in the background, immovably entrenched on cable even as it has been tossed from corporate merger to corporate merger. Born as part of Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System, in 1996 it became a part of Time Warner. In 2000 America Online bought Time Warner for $164 billion, and in 2006 Ted Turner himself left the Time Warner board. In 2009, the biggest corporate mistake in history reached its inevitable conclusion, and AOL was spun off from the company it once attempted to dominate.

Through it all there have been monumental culture shifts and budget re-adjustments, ideas tried out and tossed aside. There are few vestiges left of its original promise.

But there is still the video, awaiting its deployment. I was an intern at CNN back in 2009. Specifically, I worked at the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Wolf was a nice enough guy, as people from Buffalo tend to be, but that's not really so weird. What was weird was seeing the apocalypse video.

I was originally told about it by a college professor of mine, who had worked at CNN for over 20 years. It sounded mostly like a mythic joke, the kind of thing that Ted Turner, the all-around "eccentric billionaire" archetype, would mention offhand. Bison ranches, the America's Cup, four girlfriends at once, the last word on the last day on earth—why not?

Turner's boast about broadcasting through the end of the world is the kind of thing you hear, in one form or another, from every startup founder. My idea is the best, it will beat all the others, it is here to stay, forever and ever. No, we won't get bought by AOL. And Turner was known for being blustery.

So when Ted Turner said that CNN was going to be playing "Nearer My God To Thee"—the song the band supposedly played when the Titanic went down—as the heavens opened up, as the fiery finger of God rained salt and brimstone from the sky, as the Earth beneath our feet opened from below and swallowed everything above, as the last CNN employee, in the last surviving CNN studio in the world, witnessed the end of existence before them, he meant it.

alucard13mm
01-06-2015, 07:28 PM
The background rumble was rather... disheartening and scary. The background white noise.

pcosmar
01-06-2015, 07:39 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY


I don't think I will be watching TV.

Pauls' Revere
01-06-2015, 09:05 PM
World ends. The last thing i'm gonna do is turn on CNN.