CNN began a revolution in television with the advent of its 24-hour cable news channel out of Atlanta in 1980, challenging the three major television networks headquartered in New York that shaped the perception of current events by Americans. This revolution was to take the world by storm during the next decade as satellite and cable television provided an alternative, if not the only, source of information for people throughout the world. With satellites over 22,400 feet above the earth's surface beaming their signal like sunshine to the earth, media and telecommunications monopolies and governments could no longer control the programming and flow of information in their countries. Each satellite receive dish that appeared, legally or illegally, created an appetite for more and more information about the rest of the world. Access to this information became necessary to compete economically with others. Within a decade, a flood of information became available to people throughout the world, and no leader of government would be without CNN. When Gorbachev and Reagan met in Iceland each had CNN to monitor the world. This global information revolution led by CNN had something to do with the way governments changed or collapsed, the way the Berlin Wall fell, and even the reaction to globalization by Islamic terrorists that led to 9/11. Americans will forever document the change with images of Bernard Shaw broadcasting from under a bed in a Baghdad hotel during the Gulf War in 1991. Sidney Pike's story is the most thorough chronicle of these changes that exists. As he met with media and government leaders around the world, trying to sell CNN programming, he faced the forces that stimulated the changes and those which offered resistance to them. Sidney Pike was a pioneer and evangelist for the global television channels and news services that are taken for granted today. This book should be read by all students of telecommunication and by anyone interested in the role the media played in globalization and democratization.
"One of the primary reasons that some 11,000 satellite TV channels are broadcasting to billions around the world is Sid Pike's dogged determination to make CNN a global news channel, now in more countries than any business on earth." -Dr. Joseph Pelton, Director of Telecommunications, George Washington University
"Sid Pike...was one of the primary builders of the company and CNN. Sid took on some of our most difficult assignments including developing CNN International into a global success." -Ted Turner "
Along with Ted Turner, Sid overcame so many skeptics-those who said: 'it just cannot be done.' Well, he and Ted, and that maverick band of original staffers Ted assembled, 'did it.' They transformed the information world."-Tom Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, CNN News Group (1990-2001), Publisher, Los Angeles Times (1977-1990)
Sidney Pike is the retired President of CNN-International Special Projects. He worked for Ted Turner for 25 years, (1971-1996). Pike has served on the boards of several major universities, the board of the Marshall McLuhan Center on Global Communications, the International Foundation for Global Studies (Avignon, France), and as CEO of the National Education Telecomm. Organization, in Washington.
