The Cable News Network (CNN) was founded by Ted Turner and first broadcast on June 1, 1980. Other television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) laughed about CNN’s seeming amateurishness and low salaries and low budgets. CNN was called “Chicken Noodle News” by at least June 1981 and “Chicken Noodle Network” by at least 1987. CNN quickly established itself in the 1980s and the nicknames are mostly historical today.
 
CNN has also been nicknamed the “Communist News Network” (cited in print since 1991), the “Clinton News Network” (cited in print since 1992), “Certainly Not News” (cited in print since 1993), the “Cabal News Network” (cited in print since 1996), the “CIA News Network” (cited in print since 1997), the “Clown News Network” (cited in print since 1998), the “Criminal News Network” (cited in print since 1998), the “Corporate News Network” (cited in print since 1999), the “Counterfeit News Network” (cited in print since 1999), the “Cartoon News Network” (cited in print since 2000), the “Crescent News Network” (cited in print since 2002), “Crap Not News” (cited in print since 2007), “Criminally Negligent News” (cited in print since 2009), the “Collapsing News Network” (cited in print since 2010), the “American Pravda” (cited in print since 2012), the “Cuomo News Network” (cited in print since 2013), the “Collusion News Network” (cited in print since 2017) and the “Cuomo Nepotism Network” (cited in print since 2017).
 
   
Wikipedia: CNN
Cable News Network (CNN) is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States. While the news channel has numerous affiliates, CNN primarily broadcasts from its headquarters at the CNN Center in Atlanta, the Time Warner Center in New York City, and studios in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. CNN is owned by parent company Time Warner, and the U.S. news channel is a division of the Turner Broadcasting System.
 
CNN is sometimes referred to as CNN/U.S. to distinguish the American channel from its international counterpart, CNN International. As of August 2010, CNN is available in over 100 million U.S. households. Broadcast coverage extends to over 890,000 American hotel rooms, and the U.S broadcast is also shown in Canada. Globally, CNN programming airs through CNN International, which can be seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories.
 
Time magazine
Press: Two Upstarts vs. the Big Three
By Janice Castro;Mary Cronin;Joyce Leviton
Monday, Jun. 01, 1981
(...)
Primarily a headline service, CNN can be quick and resourceful when the news is hot, tends to flag when it is not, and is often plagued by technical glitches. Nevertheless, network hot dogs who used to call it “Chicken Noodle News” are be ginning to feel the heat: Turner is currently suing the Reagan Administration and the three networks for denying his news teams full participation in pool coverage.
 
5 June 1982, New Orleans (LA) Times-Picayune, “Ted Turner gets ready for another big battle” by Joe Urschel, sec. 5, pg. 5, cols. 1-2:
The networks called it “Turner’s Folly” and “Chicken Noodle News” and started preparing for Turner’s financial funeral.
(...)
Suddenly CBS wanted to buy the Chicken Noodle News. Turner declined.
 
Google Books
28 June 1982, New York magazine, pg. 40, col. 2:
Some network executives have long mocked Turrner’s Cable News Network in public (NBC president Frank once scornfully called it “Newsak”; another network official described it as “Chicken Noodle News”), but they are beginning to concede privately that CNN is a formidable challenge.
 
Google Books
The Corporate Warriors
By Douglas K. Ramsey
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin
1987
Pg. 27:
Turner knew he could raise loans by pledging more of the company’s assets, but CNN needed a major boost in ad revenues, which would now depend on the untested product itself, the all-day news channel that some network executives and trade journalists had taken derisively to calling in advance Chicken Noodle News.
 
New York (NY) Times
MAKING ‘NEWS ON THE CHEAP’ PAY OFF
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
Published: April 19, 1987
ATLANTA— IT is 8 o’clock in the morning, and the assignment editors and the producers of Cable News Network troop into the conference room for their regular morning meeting.
(...)
After nearly seven years of giving the news round-the-clock - 8,760 hours of fires, Presidential speeches, invasions and cat skinnings a year - the network that its big rivals used to mockingly call the Chicken Noodle Network has achieved hard-won respectability.
 
Google News Archive
2 June 1990, Toledo (OH) Blade, pg. P2, col. 1:
“Chicken-noodle network”
marks its 10th anniversary
BY JAMES ENDRST
Conventional wisdom had it that this day would never come.
 
But yesterday, June 1, 1990, CNN, the world’s first 24-hour news network, turned 10 years old.
   
The Independent (London)
Chicken Noodle News celebrates 20th year
By David Usborne
Thursday, 1 June 2000
One billion people will be invited to a festival of nostalgia on their television screens today. That is because a billion is the potential worldwide audience of CNN, the Cable News Network, and because it is 20 years today since it was first launched.
(...)
The network, founded in Atlanta, Georgia, by the ever-flamboyant Ted Turner and now a unit of the Time Warner conglomerate, is sending another message: “We’re still here”. Dubbed the Chicken Noodle Network, the channel that promised 24-hour news was at first considered a daft eccentricity by many, doomed to fail.
   
OCLC WorldCat record
Chicken Noodle News A CNN Whodunit.
Author: Baker, John
Publisher: Dailey Swan Pub 2009.
Edition/Format:  Book : English
Summary: Reveals the chronological history of how CNN changed the news viewing habits of the world.