The Apocalypse Will be Televised and This is the Video CNN Plans to Show
By Kyle Koster
With the United States and North Korea currently taking turns flexing their muscles, it is not a bad time to familiarize yourself with CNN’s infamous Doomsday video, which was released to the public by Jalopnik in 2015. The last thing viewers tuned to the network will ever see should things break very badly will be a standard definition recording of a military band playing Nearer My God to Thee.
Why? Because that’s what Ted Turner, perhaps inspired by the doomed band on the deck of the Titanic, wanted. And if nothing else, Turner is a man who plans ahead. I, for one, am looking forward to the snarky tweets that will surely flood in as the antiquated video plays. There is something so comforting in the knowledge that Millennials will be blamed for ruining end-of-time presentations.
Viewers who believe CNN to be fake news can rest easy knowing Fox News also plans to continue broadcasting to the very end, though without the cheesy musical send-off. In David Friend’s Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11, Roger Ailes touches on his network’s apocalyptic plans.
"There were deeper and more disturbing repercussions, geopolitically and, to many, spiritually [about so many people watching the events simultaneously]. “The implications from a television standpoint,” says Roger Ailes, chairman of FOX News and FOX Television Stations, “are simply that: When the end of the world comes, we’ll be able to cover it live until the last camera goes out. I believe I mean it literally. If you can witness something like [9/11] by two billion people, live, then there’s nothing that can’t be covered. And if we get into a world war, with nuclear weapons, I assume we’ll be covering it live.”"
MSNBC’s ultimate plans are less clear, but if there was any occasion to bring back Keith Olbermann, this would be it. He’d be the perfect voice of righteous anger to complement the situation.