THE DAY CNN LEARNED TO GO WALL-TO-WALL

CNN had assigned me to supervise a 9 am to Noon newscast and have anchors and producers in Atlanta, New York City, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles.  It was a first for the network, a first for me, and a first for me to try out what I had promised myself years before.

I usually left the CNN newsroom on Techwood Drive in Atlanta about 1 pm weekdays, an hour after NewsWatch ended.  On this first day of September in 1983 I paused to look at an “Urgent” from the wire services:  Korean Airlines flight #007 was missing on its trip to Korea from the U.S.  You can imagine CNN gets many “Urgent” messages from the wire services around the world.  But this one seemed particularly interesting to me.  So I stayed in the newsroom for an extra hour or so, forgoing my usual effort to sleep from 2 pm until my kids got home from school.  I could always get more sleep “tomorrow.”

After about an hour and a half of watching the story with no new information I decided to head home.  Once home I kept tuned to CNN for updates.  The original story kept being repeated every half hour or so but no new information was forthcoming.  Normally I’d go to bed about 8 pm only to get up again about 2 am.  That was so I could be at CNN again by 3 am to prepare for the next DayWatch.   This night I stayed up until about 10 pm waiting for more details.  They were few and far between.

I arrived at CNN at my usual 3 am timeslot.  As I prepared for the 4 am arrival of my producers I kept watching for any new details on KAL 007.  There was no substantive update.  The first hour rundown for DayWatch, the 9 am hour, was due to the writers and editors by 7 am.  The 7 am producer was making last minute adjustments to that rundown at 6:45 when another “Urgent” came across the wires:  “KAL 007 had been shot at by Soviet jets.”

Immediately I said to the 9 am producer, the 10:30 am producer, and my producers in NYC and LA: “Drop everything.  We’re going wall-to-wall with 007.”  You must understand that in 1983, 3 years into the life of Cable News Network, top breaking news stories ran at the top and sometimes the bottom of each hour but NEVER wall-to-wall.  There was so much else to put on the air, so much more news to report.

BUT….I also thought of that night in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee; the night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  That night in Memphis I was busy in the newsroom producing the 10 pm newscast at WMC-TV, editing news film, and doing “phoners” for TV and radio stations across the U.S. and around the world.  I was also keeping an eye on the program monitor in the newsroom watching what we were reporting about the huge story…both WMC-TV program interrupts and NBC News program interrupts.  But it began to bother me that they were, indeed, interrupts.  That night NBC’s prime time lineup was mostly comedy shows.  So at the end of a local or national interrupt the reporter or anchor would say: “That’s the latest on the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the subsequent unrest.  More as it develops.  WE NOW RETURN YOU TO OUR REGULAR PROGRAMMING ALREADY IN PROGRESS.” 

That ending just seemed wrong to me…the “kid” in the newsroom.  I made myself a promise that night that “if I’m ever in charge and a big, really big story breaks I’m taking air and keeping it…reporting the story on-going.”  And that’s just what I was deciding to do that morning at CNN about KAL 007.

My staff in four cities backed me on the decision and off we went preparing for 3 hours if necessary of updates and repeats of the big story.  As usual at 7:30 am CNN Executive Vice President and to many of us our news mentor Ed Turner arrived.  After looking over the 8 am rundown of the 6am to 9 am newscast (EP John Zarrella…now CNN Miami Bureau Chief and space program reporter) he then moved on to the first hour rundown of DayWatch.  It was there, immediately, that he saw we were going wall-to-wall with KAL 007.  He said rather forcefully:  “Byrd, we don’t do that.”  My immediate reply was:  “Ed, if you don’t like it you can fire me at noon.”  He huffed and puffed for a few seconds, shook his head, and walked off to his office.

At 9 am we told what we knew about the missing plane and the Soviet jets.  We updated the information that one of the passengers the flight was a U.S. congressman from Georgia, Larry McDonald.  We went live to The White House and The State Department.  We went live on the phone to other congressmen already in Korea for a conference and live on the phone to CNN’s Moscow Bureau.  We updated.  We repeated.  But we did not go live to The Pentagon because none of the networks had, as yet, worked out the technical details on daily live reports from there.

At about 9:40 am our DayWatch Atlanta production assistant, Pat Reap, came to me and said: “I’ve got Congressman McDonald’s Rome, Georgia office manager on the phone.  Do you want to put him on live?”  I thanked Pat (and, as it turns out, I could never thank him enough) and rushed the Rome office manager on the air.  Atlanta anchors Dave Walker and Lois Hart, CNN’s first anchor on the air when the network began 3 years before, began asking the interview.  In his first answer the manager told them and a nationwide audience:  “I just got off the phone with The Pentagon.  The plane was shot down and everyone on board is dead.”  This was 9:45 am.

We had our big break in the story.  We rolled forward:  live to The White House (nothing on that yet here), live to The State Department (nothing on that yet here), live to Moscow (we’re beginning to get some rumblings here).  Then we got word The Pentagon had called a news conference for 10 am.  CNN and the other networks sent microwave trucks to The Pentagon “just in case.”  The Pentagon news conference confirming the information that the Soviets had, indeed, shot down the plane and everyone on board was dead.  That news conference didn’t end until about 10:30 am.  That’s when NBC, CBS, ABC and the other news outlets had first news they could report on the story.  By that time we were 45 minute down the road on the details.

We went on with the story up to Noon, when we handed things over to the next program.  I then walked across the newsroom and down the hall to Ed Turner’s office.  I just stood in the door. After a moment Ed looked up and said simply:  “You can keep your job, Byrd.”