When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Beth Knobel, a future TV news correspondent, was in graduate school. Emerging from class, she saw TV sets had been set up in the lobby. They were tuned to CNN, the 24/7 news channel that Ted Turner had launched about five years earlier, which was carrying the launch live.
“Shuttle launches were just kind of routine and the broadcast networks weren’t even covering them anymore,” says Knobel, who worked for CBS News in the 1990s and now teaches journalism at Fordham University. “CNN did. So when things went so tragically wrong, there they were on top of the story like no one else.”
