NEW YORK -- Thinking back on CNN's 20 years, we might recall its live video of President Reagan walking into a hospital after surviving a would-be assassin's assault; its shocking pictures of the Challenger explosion; its scenes of the Berlin Wall coming down; its hours devoted to the Persian Gulf War.
Or we can leave such reminiscences to CNN, which will pat its own back in a pair of anniversary specials. Tonight and Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, the network will present a sort of "Greatest Hits -- 1980-2000," with Larry King as host.Fine. With more than 175,000 hours under its belt (and that's just counting the original cable network; by now there are six bearing the CNN name), the Atlanta-based Cable News Network has amassed a record worth crowing about since Ted Turner flicked the switch at 6 p.m. on June 1, 1980.
Turner's big, crazy dream came true. And then some.
"CNN has provided the world with news and information whenever and wherever it occurs," says Tom Johnson, CNN News Group chairman. "At a time that viewers and listeners wished to get it, rather than when producers decided it should be available."
But beyond that incontestable fact, what has CNN meant to the information age it fostered? How, in a larger sense, has it transformed television? Our lives? Us?
Think back to 1980. There were three broadcast networks and PBS. National cable channels were few. And on basic cable, original programming, other than live sportscasts, was almost nonexistent.
Meanwhile, TV news came to us in isolated helpings. We could catch the headlines at dinner time with "Uncle Walter" Cronkite. If that half-hour didn't satisfy us, we could skip Johnny Carson at bedtime for a brand-new ABC program called "Nightline." And back in May 1980, there was a total of three weekly magazine shows: CBS's "60 Minutes," ABC's "20/20" and, for a couple more months, NBC's shortlived "Prime Time Saturday" with Tom Snyder.
This didn't seem sufficient to Turner, a young Atlanta media magnate and emerging Southern folk hero.
Already he was enjoying success after turning his ragtag Channel 17 (with its "Andy Griffith Show" reruns and Atlanta Braves games) into a national "super station" by beaming it from sea to shining sea by satellite.
Now he meant to shower news on Americans by satellite around the clock, and with his typical messianic bombast, he declared, "We won't sign off until the end of the world -- and we'll cover that live."
Whether Turner makes good on that pledge remains to be seen. But 20 years ago, everyone (or, at least, the 1.7 million viewers it originally reached) could see that CNN had, against all odds, signed on.
Still, CNN was viewed with skepticism and bemusement as it flew by the seat of its pants.
How could this bargain-basement venture (originating from the basement of a social organization's converted clubhouse) find enough viewers, money or even news to keep going?
Radically different from the broadcast networks' neatly distilled newscasts, the nonstop CNN "was widely castigated for its lack of editing and lack of story selection," recalls Porter Bibb, a media specialist for Technology Partners and author of a book on Turner.
But what CNN was doing, Bibb says, was nothing less than reinventing TV news. "It changed the definition of news from what has happened to what is happening. CNN took the news out of the newsroom and put the viewer in the middle of the event."
As Tom Johnson looks back at CNN's first 20 years (and his own first decade running it), he can chart its penetration through the United States, then, increasingly, the world.
"Now we're into the era of the World Wide Web and on-demand services," he says. "We will be able to provide you with live, real-time information in your home, in your office, in your car, on your beeper and on your cell phone."
Helping drive these innovations is the imminent merger of Internet provider America Online with Time Warner, CNN's owner since it gobbled up Turner Broadcasting System in 1996.
Not exactly Ted Turner's baby anymore, the supercharged CNN today competes in a TV universe that includes MSNBC, CNBC and Fox News Channel -- all-news rivals that it made possible.
But more than that, CNN paved the way for channels as different as the Weather Channel is from MTV. CNN gave us a new relationship with our TV, transforming it from our living-room program dispenser to a multichannel window; a nonstop sensation device; an intravenous media drip.
And -- go figure! -- it fulfilled these musings of Marshall McLuhan: " 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished," the philosopher wrote in his book "The Medium Is the Massage" 13 years before CNN signed on. "Instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
"We now live in a global village."