Ted Turner made a "doomsday video" for CNN to play during the end of the world and it's the most haunting thing I've ever seen

Image for article: Ted Turner made a "doomsday video" for CNN to play during the end of the world and it's the most haunting thing I've ever seen

Y'all probably saw that CNN founder Ted Turner died this week.

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Turner was a media giant several times over; you don't launch the 24-hour news revolution without cementing your place on the Wall of Legends. And as we noted, he also found time to save the American Bison (and even create Captain Planet, that old Millennial mainstay environmental cartoon).

What you may not know about him, however, was that in the early days of CNN he was apparently concerned about end-of-the-world scenarios, so much so that he crafted a short video he intended would be played if the bombs were about to fall.

Seriously. Here it is.

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Me as the nukes are on their way and CNN switches over to this unbelievably eerie, haunting sendoff:

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And yes, that song is "Nearer my God to Thee," the song several survivors of the Titanic sinking claimed the band played as the ship was slipping beneath the waves.

And yes, this video is a real, legit part of CNN policy; per Wikipedia, Ted Turner himself even acknowledged it at the launch of the network:

Barring satellite problems, we won't be signing off until the world ends ... We'll be on, and we will cover it [the end of the world] live, and that will be our last, last event. We'll play the National Anthem only one time, on the first of June [1980], and when the end of the world comes, we'll play 'Nearer My God To Thee' before we sign off.

Thankfully the end of the world hasn't yet arrived, so they've had no reason to deploy this deeply unsettling video. But it's still there, still in the CNN archives, literally waiting for "the end of the world," as writer Michael Ballaban revealed years ago:

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Not sure who you're supposed to "contact" if the world's ending. I guess it won't matter at that point!

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