CNN

American television news in 1980 occupied about thirty minutes of the evening. The three networks decided each afternoon what the day had contained, delivered it at dinnertime, and went back to entertainment. Ted Turner, an Atlanta billboard heir who had turned a local UHF station into a satellite-delivered superstation, argued that satellites and cable had removed the reason for the limit. On June 1, 1980, the Cable News Network went on the air with a small staff, a converted country club for a studio, and a mandate to never stop.

The industry expected it to fail. Network executives called it the Chicken Noodle Network, the channel lost money for years, and it reached only a fraction of American homes on cable systems that were still being built. What it had was time — hours to fill, which meant it could carry a hearing, a launch, or a press conference from beginning to end while the networks cut away. The Challenger explosion in January 1986 was carried live by CNN alone.

The Gulf War settled the question. When the bombing of Baghdad began on January 16, 1991, CNN's Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett, and John Holliman were reporting by satellite telephone from a hotel room in the city, and for hours theirs was the only live account from inside the target. Audiences worldwide, including governments and the military, watched a war unfold in real time. The channel's ratings multiplied, the phrase CNN effect entered the vocabulary of foreign policy, and continuous coverage became the assumed standard rather than an experiment.

What followed was less the triumph of one channel than the end of a common schedule. Fox News and MSNBC both launched in 1996, cable news split along partisan lines that the original model had not anticipated, and the internet compressed the cycle further until continuous became instantaneous. The measured evening summary that CNN displaced never came back. Whatever else it did, the channel established that news would henceforth be a stream rather than an appointment.