USA · Bias: Left-center
Warner Bros. Discovery
Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980 as the world's first 24-hour news channel — a format so novel that critics nicknamed it the "Chicken Noodle Network" and figured it would flop within months. Instead it invented the always-on news cycle everyone (including Fox) now runs on, and became must-watch TV during the 1991 Gulf War, when its reporters were the only ones broadcasting live from Baghdad. These days it's in a genuine ratings fight for its life: CNN posted its best quarter since 2022 in early 2026, but its roughly 800,000 average primetime viewers are still a fraction of Fox's audience. Its answer, "the middle ground," often just means running a US Democrat-leaning lens on stories and calling it neutral.
For 12 years, CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan sat on stories about atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein's regime — including a plot to assassinate Jordan's own royal family — because reporting them honestly would have gotten CNN's Baghdad bureau shut down and put its sources at risk. The motive, he argued, was protecting human lives and preserving the network's rare access inside Iraq. In April 2003, right after the U.S. invasion made it safe to talk, Jordan finally admitted it all in a stunning New York Times op-ed titled "The News We Kept to Ourselves." The confession blew up into a genuine scandal: critics accused CNN of trading its journalistic soul for a Baghdad dateline, and the episode remains one of the starkest admissions in modern journalism that "access" and "truth" don't always point the same direction.