I grew up knowing Ted Turner from “Superstation WTBS” on cable television. It was the station that showed reruns of The Andy Griffith Show, Gilligan's Island, and I Love Lucy, along with Atlanta Braves baseball games. All of them seemed to live on WTBS. Let’s don’t forget, professional wrestling that later became WCW and it’s rival at the time WWE.

Back then, Ted Turner felt less like a media mogul and more like some colorful Southern businessman who figured out how to beam Braves baseball and old sitcoms into every farmhouse, trailer, and mountain hollow in America.

Then he changed the world.

In 1980, Turner launched CNN, the first 24 hour news network. Most folks didn’t realize it at the time, but that decision completely transformed how Americans consumed news and politics.

Believe it or not, there used to be morning an evening newspaper.

In towns across America, folks would come home from work and pick up the afternoon paper on the way home. Local radio stations would read the farm reports, lunch menus, obituaries, and weather forecast. Then around supper time, families would sit down and watch thirty minutes of national news with people like Walter Cronkite.

News had a rhythm to it.

It belonged to the community.

Then came nonstop news.

CNN eventually inspired competitors like Fox News and MSNBC. News slowly shifted from information into entertainment, identity, and outrage. Politics stopped being something you checked in on and became something people lived inside 24 hours a day.

Today, roughly one out of every four Americans gets at least some of their news from Fox News, and Fox has been the number one cable news network for 24 consecutive years.

Think about that for a minute.

An entire generation of Americans has now grown up inside a nonstop cable news environment that Ted Turner unintentionally created. Not just Fox News viewers either. CNN, MSNBC, podcasts, YouTube personalities, TikTok clips, Facebook feeds, and algorithm driven outrage all grew from the same 24 hour media ecosystem.

And while national media exploded, local media quietly died.

That’s the part of the Ted Turner story rural America understands better than anybody.

Across places like Southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, Northeast Tennessee, and thousands of rural counties nationwide, hometown newspapers shrank or disappeared. Local radio stations got bought by national corporations. Reporters stopped attending courthouse meetings and school board sessions.

Researchers now call many of these communities “news deserts.”

That phrase sounds academic until you live in one.

A news desert means nobody explains why your property taxes went up. Nobody covers the Board of Supervisors meeting. Nobody investigates why the local hospital is struggling or why the rural EMS / fire department can’t recruit enough people anymore.

Meanwhile, rural Americans can tell you every detail about political drama in Washington, New York, or California because national media fills every television screen and social media feed.

You can sit inside a Hardees in Wise County and hear folks arguing about Congress while nobody knows what happened at last night’s town council meeting.

The economics of media changed everything.

A screaming match between national pundits generates more clicks and advertising dollars than covering a sewer project in Dickenson County. Large corporations consolidated newspapers, radio stations, and television outlets into giant chains where local coverage became less profitable.

Rural America felt the loss first because small towns often only had one newspaper and one local radio station to begin with. Once those disappeared, there wasn’t a backup system.

The vacuum got filled by Facebook rumors, partisan memes, podcasts, and cable television personalities who may know little about the communities they’re talking to.

Ironically, Ted Turner probably never intended for that to happen.

Many journalists still describe him as a visionary who believed television could connect the world through information. And in many ways, he succeeded. CNN changed journalism forever.

But somewhere along the way, America stopped hearing its own hometown voice.

The local storyteller disappeared. The courthouse reporter vanished. The newspaper editor who knew every family in the county retired and was never replaced.

And maybe that’s the real lesson rural America should think about this week after Ted Turner’s passing.

Not just how he created cable news.

But how America traded local journalism for partisan news entertainment.

Be curious, not judgmental.

Till next time, that’s the story from the ‘Back Forty’. — John W. Peace II

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John W. Peace II is a fifth-generation farmer from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he grew up on his family’s dairy, Clinch Haven Farms, and still lives today. He’s a proud father to Trey and Shelby Peace, and partner in life to Cathy Swinney. A Virginia Tech graduate with graduate studies at Penn State, he served as the youngest Chair of the Wise County Board of Supervisors (2004–2008). John co-owns urTOPIX LLC (urTopixLLC.com), a Democratic campaign training firm focused on reaching rural voters that is sponsored by www.RuralAmericaRising.com PAC. He’s also a two-time Amazon bestselling author. Learn more at www.JohnWPeace.com.

Contact:  https://linktr.ee/JohnWPeace