This is a page for information on various news networks.
U.S. News Networks
Cable News Network, more commonly known as CNN, is the first of the full-time American cable news networks. In fact, it was one of the first cable networks, period. Founded on June 1, 1980, by Atlanta-based media mogul Ted Turner, CNN is now a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery (the owners of the Warner Bros. movie studio) and the world's second largest network (behind The BBC).
When not reporting breaking news, CNN mostly features a plethora of talking heads, discussing the ramifications of said news. In the past, people have disputed whether the network was unfairly biased toward Democrats or Republicans, but it did become markedly opinionated against President Donald Trump during his time in office, particularly anchor Don Lemon, who flat out called him "the worst of the worst". Some (particularly Jon Stewart on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) have accused it of putting a fast-paced feel with an overabundance of Yet Another Baby Panda stories above serious discussion and investigative journalism.
Around the late 2000's and the early 2010's, to differentiate itself from its partisan rivals, CNN downplayed its ideologically charged, pundit-focused talk shows in favor of (allegedly) more sober reporting. This is best evidenced by the way that it cancelled the talk show Lou Dobbs Tonight, which many people feel is the result of the controversy that the show had been garnering in recent years due to Dobbs' outspoken views regarding immigration, President Barack Obama's citizenship, and the supposed "North American Union". However, some of their straight news hosts have been accused of bias.
After Lou Dobbs left, CNN's lineup began transforming into a revolving door: Campbell Brown resigned, Rick Sanchez (who hosted Rick's List, a Web 2.0 news program that used to just be an average hour of Newsroom) was fired after controversial remarks on a radio show, State of the Union got downsized so John King could host a new weekday show, Eliot Spitzer left Parker Spitzer (which got downgraded to In the Arena before it got canned), Larry King retired (and was replaced by Piers Morgan, who would become a wildly controversial member of the team and develop an infamous feud with Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson), American Morning was split into Early Start and Starting Point, and John King's show got cancelled in favor of Erin Burnett. The changes led to some of CNN's worst ratings in years.
In 2013, Jeff Zucker, who formerly worked for NBCUniversal, took over as the new network president. It only took him a few months before he began making major changes: Chris Cuomo was snatched from ABC to host the new morning show New Day with Kate Bolduan, Jake Tapper got a new afternoon show in mid-March, plans for a new 10:00 pm ET show were revealed, and their classic debate show Crossfire got temporarily Un-Cancelled. Zucker also brought back the "classic" ticker, and after years of "generic local news announcer guy", brought back James Earl Jones and his famous Station Ident (alongside variants featuring various personalities).
All that said, CNN is still home to some genuinely awesome news reporting; Anderson Cooper, who won a Peabody Award for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina and is generally famous for being an Intrepid Reporter with a penchant for fair, honest, hard-hitting coverage from all corners of the globe, has been broadcasting in the 8pm slot with Anderson Cooper 360 since 2003, and British-Iranian journalist Christiane Amanpour is a household name in foreign affairs correspondence who is respected by government officials and world leaders all around the globe. Recently, Jake Tapper has been gaining traction for his honest yet snarky reporting, no-hand-holding interviews, and has even been responsible for massive news with his State Of The Union show.
As CNN is a controversial subject, please keep edits civil.
Trope Namer/inspiration for Alphabet News Network.
The channel has a number of spinoffs and international versions:
- HLN. Launched on January 1, 1982 as CNN2, it was rebranded as Headline News on August 9 the same year, before taking its current name on December 15, 2008. Originally, it aired just that; every half hour would start with the top stories, followed by business stories. At 15 minutes they would quickly recap the top stories then cover sports, and at 25 minutes they would have a short human interest piece. Then it would start over again. Starting in 2005, however, it began to suffer from Network Decay, catering to news/current affairs talk shows (during primetime and late night/early morning hours), pop culture/celebrity reporting, live court cases, and Missing White Woman Syndrome.
- CNN International. Launched in September 1985, it targets viewers outside the United States (although it is available on the CNN app for subscribers to the U.S. channel, and it is also the basis of the CNN Max channel on the Max streaming service), and has a reputation for featuring more news and fewer talking heads. Also, in contrast to the American original, it has the tagline Go without borders to emphasize its global views. It is the second most-watched news network in the world, behind BBC World News, its main competitor. Although mainly basing itself in Atlanta like the main channel, it also has offices in London, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Abu Dhabi. The channel is technically made up of five different variants (Asia-Pacific, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Latin America, North America, and South Asia), each of which used to feature unique programs, but since the mid-2000s, the variants have been streamlined, and the only remaining differences are programs inserted during breaks, such as weather reports.
- CNNj. Launched on March 1, 2003, it is a version of CNN International Asia-Pacific specifically tailored for Japanese viewers. While other regions receive programs in untranslated English, CNNj's programs are provided Japanese subtitles by Japan Cable Television (a company partly owned by TV Asahi) for 17 hours every day.
- CNN en Español. Launched on March 19, 1997, it is a Spanish-language channel focusing on Latin American news, though it is also seen in Spain. It is based in Atlanta, like its parent channel.
- CNN Türk. Launched on October 11, 1999, it is the Turkish version of CNN. Notable for being CNN's first foreign version (it is based in İstanbul), and for being the first Turkish TV channel to be established in partnership with a foreign media company.
- CNN-News18. Launched on December 18, 2005 as a joint venture with Network 18 under the name CNN-IBN, it is the Indian version of CNN. It is based in New Delhi.
- CNN Chile. Launched on December 4, 2008, it is the Chilean version of CNN. It is based in Santiago.
- CNN Indonesia. Launched on December 15, 2015, it is the Indonesian version of CNN. It is based in Jakarta.
- CNN Brasil. Launched on March 15, 2020, it is the Brazilian version of CNN. It is based in São Paulo.
- CNN Prima News. Launched on May 3, 2020, it is the Czech version of CNN. It is based in Prague.
- CNN Portugal. Launched on November 22, 2021, making it the network's newest foreign spinoff, it is the Portuguese version of CNN. It is based in Lisbon.
Former spinoffs include:
- CNN Airport. Launched on January 20, 1992 as CNN Airport Network, it is a version of CNN seen only in airports, which showed mostly CNN rebroadcasts and looping weather and flight delay forecasts, but specifically removes all mention of stories such as plane crashes or other events which might make wary travelers panic before they get onto a plane, along with stories that shouldn't be shown on a public channel with children around; when this happens, they quickly cut to a weather map. The network also carried sports programming from Turner Sports, as well as holding the airport rights to a slate of NFL games including the Super Bowl.Thanks in large part to the fact that you can now simply get the same information on your mobile phone, CNN Airport Network was discontinued on March 31, 2021.
- CNN Checkout Channel. Launched on February 20, 1992 as a version of the Airport Network, it targeted at grocery stores. It was not successful, only lasting a year before going off the air on March 31, 1993.
- CNNfn. Launched on November 29, 1995, it is their answer to CNBC. After years of struggling for an audience and cable coverage, it went off the air on December 15, 2004.
- CNN Sports Illustrated or CNNSI. Launched on December 12, 1996, it was their answer to ESPN's Sports Center, which had the misfortune of coming into being around the same time as ESPNEWS (which was created as a Take That! move by ESPN against their competition). It went off the air on May 15, 2002.
- CNN+. Launched on January 27, 1999 in partnership with Sogecable (which also operated the Spanish branch of Canal+, hence the name), it was a Spanish-language channel for Spain which went off the air on December 28, 2010.
- CNN Italia. Launched on November 15, 1999, it is the Italian version of CNN. It went off the air on September 12, 2003.
- CNN Philippines. Launched on March 16, 2015, it is the Filipino version of CNN. It is based in Mandaluyong, located in Metro Manila. It was shuttered on January 31, 2024.
American 24-hour cable news network that was launched in 1996, which has become almost synonymous with Rupert Murdoch in the United States. Much of its style and messaging, however, can be traced back to its first chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes, a former Republican campaign operative and former head of CNBC; many of Fox's personalities are holdovers from America's Talking, a right-leaning talk channel helmed by Ailes before he left NBC in 1996. Since Ailes' firing for sexual misconduct in 2016, its CEO has been Suzanne Scott, with Murdoch's son Lachlan playing a role in operations.
While initially insistent on being impartial journalists who happened to be more "balanced" than their competitors (hence slogans like "Fair and Balanced" and "We Report, You Decide"), Fox increasingly embraced its role as a conservative mouthpiece in the American media landscape. This has made the network a lightning rod of controversy, with liberals accusing Fox of broadcasting false or misleading reporting, while academics characterized Fox as "quasi-state media" during the presidency of Donald Trump. In 2023, Fox was forced to pay $787 million to settle a defamation suit brought by election software company Dominion Voting Systems, the discovery phase of which had uncovered embarrassing texts which proved that Fox anchors knowingly deceived their audience about the 2020 election being stolen.
As Fox News is also a controversial subject, please keep edits civil.
Spinoffs include:
- Fox Business Network. Launched October 15, 2007, it's a right-leaning business network that primarily competes with CNBC.
- Fox Nation. Launched on November 27, 2018, this is a subscription streaming service geared towards opinion-based talk shows, documentaries, and lifestyle programs.
- Fox Weather. Launched October 25, 2021, its main function is providing weather forecasts and information for the United States. Often simulcasted on MyNetworkTV affiliates on weekends, and on Fox News and Fox Business during severe weather events.
American 24-hour news network that was launched in 1996 (just a few months before Fox News) as a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft. Its name was a portmanteau of MSN (Microsoft Network) and NBC. MSNBC was the revamp of a channel called "America's Talking", which went on the air in 1994 and was mostly focused on talk shows. It was, clearly, not a success, and the only show from that era to survive to the present day is Politics with Chris Matthews (now known as Hardball with Chris Matthews, a name it gained after a Channel Hop to CNBC shortly after the shutdown of America's Talking). The big impact of the cancellation of AT was that Roger Ailes ran that channel; he quickly moved to become the head of Fox News, which naturally is MSNBC's Arch-Enemy.
MSNBC was intended by its creators to bring a unique syncronicity between online and cable news, mostly by putting viewer emails on the air. It was a pretty novel idea... in 1996. But once the other two big networks jumped online, MSNBC's high-tech gimmick began to look redundant. The network would spend nearly a decade floundering in last place (in spite of the strength of NBC News behind it), desperately trying to ape the success that the Fox News Channel was having with opinion-driven pundit shows, while having ratings more comparable to those of CNN Headline News than with the big players of cable news. Meanwhile, Prime Time was increasingly being filled with true crime and prison "documentaries". In 2005, Microsoft sold 32% of MSNBC to NBC Universal, retaining only 18% (the website, which is actually a separate unit from the TV network, remained a 50/50 partnership until 2012), and later dropping out completely, giving NBCU 100%.
In the later years of the George W. Bush administration, however, the network took the popularity of Countdown with Keith Olbermann and the April 2007 departure of Don Imus as the chance to try a new strategy. It moved its token conservative Joe Scarborough from the prime-time lineup to Imus's old time slot, and the network's weekday prime-time ended up sliding towards the left and was called "the liberal Fox News" by people who tried to defend Fox News by admitting that while FNC was a right-wing propaganda channel, MSNBC was the same to the left. It doesn't help that over the years most conservatives on the channel were fired and were picked up by Fox News. But finally, in October 2010, the network adopted a new catchphrase "Lean Forward", which signaled to many analysts that it had dropped all pretense and become essentially "the liberal Fox News". Just don't tell them that.
As MSNBC is also also a controversial subject, please keep edits civil.
American 24-hour news network that was launched in 1989, specializing in business and financial news. A spinoff of NBC and sister network to MSNBC, the network struggled to compete with its more established rival, the Financial News Network (founded in 1981), for its first few years of existence. However, after an accounting scandal caused FNN to go bankrupt in 1991, CNBC purchased what remained and merged their operations. CNBC grew further with its corporate partnership with Dow Jones, though this ended when Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox News) purchased Dow Jones in 2007.
Weekdays on CNBC are spent tracking the movements of the stock market, often from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as well as individual stocks and commodities; on nights and weekends (when the markets are closed), the network airs a mix of talk shows, documentaries, and reality shows including Jay Leno's Garage. Ironically, despite being a sister network to MSNBC, CNBC's opinion programs tend to be more right-leaning than would be found on "the liberal Fox News".
The channel has a number of spinoffs and international versions:
- CNBC World. Carries programs from both the domestic channel and CNBC's various overseas affiliates, aimed at an international audience.
- CNBC Asia. Launched on June 20, 1995, and based in Singapore, focusing on Asian markets.
- Nikkei CNBC. Joint venture between CNBC Asia, Nikkei, and TV Tokyo, launched in 1999.
- CNBC TV18. Joint venture with the Indian media conglomerate TV18, launched in 1999.
- CNBC Awaaz. Hindi-language service, launched in 2008.
- CNBC Arabiya. Launched in 2003 and based in Dubai, focusing on Middle East markets from an Arab perspective.
- CNBC Indonesia. Indonesian service, based in Jakarta and launched in 2018.
- CNBC Europe. Launched on March 11, 1996, and based in London, focusing on European markets.
- Class CNBC. Launched on June 14, 2000, this localized service focuses on Italy and is a joint venture with the publishing house Class Editori. Its studios are in Milan, home of the Borsa Italiana.
- CNBC Africa. Launched on June 1, 2007, and based in Johannesburg, focusing on African markets.
Former spinoffs include:
- America's Talking. Launched in 1994, closed in 1996 to make way for MSNBC.
- CNBC-e. Based in Turkey. Launched in 2000, closed in 2015.
- MBN-CNBC. Based in South Korea. Launched in 2002, rebranded MBN by 2011.
- CNBC Pakistan. Launched in 2005, rebranded as the G News Network in 2013.
- TVN CNBC. Based in Poland. Launched in 2007, closed in 2014.
- SBS CNBC. Based in South Korea. Launched in 2009, rebranded as SBS Biz in 2020.
Overseas News Networks
- The story, and the other story.
Qatari owned-and-operated Pan-Arabian 24-hour news network launched in 1996, following the closure of the BBC's Arabic language television station. The name "Al-Jazeera" means "The (Arabian) Peninsula".note Incredibly influential, the network granted Qatar incredible amounts of global influence. It first gained international attention for its in-depth, on-site reporting of the Iraq War.
Al Jazeera is also a very controversial network. It has at various times been accused of being anti-American, antisemitic, and Islamophobic (but not all at the same time). About the only "anti-anything" that they can uncontroversially be proved to be is "anti-Israel", and only that in the sense of "disapproving of the continued Israeli presence in the West Bank and blockade of Gaza," which quite literally comes with the territory (being an Arab network, after all, Al Jazeera criticizing the Israeli occupation is rather like an American network during the Cold War criticizing the Soviet Union). The network has received complaints for media bias towards the language they are broadcasting in — the English-speaking channel is accused of being more pro-American, while the Arabic versions (especially in Palestine) are accused of glorifying "the resistance", showing terrorist-produced videos and messages. Thanks to its extensive coverage of the Iraq War, George W. Bush is infamously rumored to have wanted to bomb it, until Tony Blair convinced him that would be really stupid.
In The Middle East, it is also controversial for coverage that is critical of local governments, with many countries having tried to ban it and reporters having gotten death threats. This is especially highlighted since the 2011 Arab Spring and what came of it, because the network is based in Qatar, and Qatar is a fervent supporter of the Arab opposition, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been banned in many Arab countries for its alleged support of terrorism. When Qatar was diplomatically isolated by the Gulf Cooperation Council (and Egypt) in 2017, one of the reasons cited for the decision was its continued refusal to shut down Al Jazeera. Predictably, Al Jazeera has taken a stance to criticize the rest of the GCC in support of Qatar. On the other hand, the network can be relied upon to not criticize the Qatari royal family, which owns it.
In addition to the main Arabic channel, Al Jazeera Media Network also runs:
- Al Jazeera Mubasher Al-'Amma (AJMG)note
- An Arabic-language channel that broadcasts conferences, political events, and other proceedings live and uninterrupted (with subtitles or live translations as needed). Its name is often translated in English as "Al Jazeera Live". Formerly known as just Al Jazeera Mubasher (AJM) until its merger with its defunct Egyptian sister channel in 2014.
- Al Jazeera English (AJE)
- An English-language news network that is broadcast globally. It airs a mixture of news broadcasts, documentaries, and discussion programs with a focus on providing information and stories in the developing world.
- Al Jazeera Balkans (AJB)
- A Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-language news network that broadcasts in the Balkan nations, primarily airs subtitled programming from other Al Jazeera divisions. It is based in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+)
- A U.S.-based online news channel, available in English, Spanish, Arabic, and French.
- beIN Sports
- An international chain of sports networks, with particular prominence in the Middle East, France, Spain, and Australia. Its operations in North America are more geared towards being a home for international sports programming (particularly soccer), although the U.S. network began to dabble in domestic college sports in 2016 by picking up some Conference USA football and basketball games. The Arabic-language channel was formerly branded as Al Jazeera Sports until 2013.
Defunct Al Jazeera channels ran the following:
- Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr (AJMM)
- An Egyptian sister channel to AJM, broadcasting from Cairo. It was banned from Egypt in 2013, following the fall of the Mohamed Morsi government, and temporarily relocated to Qatar, before it was merged with its sister channel to form AJMG.
- Al Jazeera America (AJAM)
- A cable news network primarily focused on American news, replacing Al Jazeera English for viewers in the United States (but does air some AJE programming). Formed after Al Jazeera purchased Al Gore's CurrentTV channel in 2013. It went out of business in 2016.
Press TV is an English-language news channel operated by the state-run media organization of Iran. Although supposedly independent of the Iranian government, Press TV has become well-known as a propaganda outlet which spreads conspiracy theories about Iran's purported enemies, with an obsessive focus on Jews.
RT, formerly known as Russia Today, is a news channel subsidized by the Russian government. While it is carried on cable TV, it is also known for its YouTube channel which has beaten Fox News in user hits. It is aimed at the international market rather than the domestic, operating cable and satellite television channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing content in various languages, including English, Spanish and Russian.
RT presents around-the-clock news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows, debates, sports news, and cultural programmes that it says provide "a Russian viewpoint on major global events". RT had branches in the U.S., U.K., Germany, South America, and the Middle East, most of which were shut down as a result of sanctions against Russia following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine (which it openly supports). It is also known for giving airtime to Conspiracy Theorists.
