When Billionaire entrepreneur Ted Turner founded CNN in 1980, he promised that the cable news network would only go off the air when the world ends.
He also promised that the newly founded company would play a specific song, “Nearer My God To Thee,” before succumbing to whatever world-ending disaster befalls humanity.
And he was dead serious, according to Jalopnik.
“We have proof that he wasn’t [joking],” Jalopnik’s Michael Ballaban reported Monday. “It lives on CNN’s Newsource archive system, under the name TURNER DOOMSDAY VIDEO. Reflecting its status as an artifact, not to be used except in the ultimate emergency.”
The supposed “doomsday video” can reportedly be found through searching CNN’s computer database, the video labeled with an ominous restriction: “[Hold for release] till end of the world confirmed.”
“Rumors of the doomsday tape’s existence have popped up from time to time, as early as 1988, in the case of the New Yorker, and as late as 2001, in the Daily News,” Jalopnik reported, adding that almost everyone thought that the video’s existence was part of a joke.
When Turner founded the network, he promised in no uncertain terms: “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.”
A spokesman for CNN did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
