The channel's success made a bona-fide mogul of founder Ted Turner and set the stage for conglomerate Time Warner's eventual acquisition of the Turner Broadcasting System in 1996. The company has 42 bureaus (11 domestic, 31 international), more than 900 affiliated local stations (which also receive news and features content via the video newswire service CNN Newsource), and several regional and foreign-language networks around the world. Since its debut, CNN has expanded its reach to a number of cable and satellite television providers, several websites, and specialized closed-circuit channels (such as CNN Airport). The American version, sometimes referred to as CNN (US), is also available in Canada, some islands of the Caribbean and in Japan, where it was first broadcast on CNNj in 2003, with simultaneous translation in Japanese. Globally, CNN programming has aired through CNN International, seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories since May 2019, however, the US domestic version has absorbed international news coverage in order to reduce programming costs. CNN claims to be "The Most Trusted Name in News", but its efforts to be nonpartisan have led to accusations of false balance. The network is known for its dramatic live coverage of breaking news, some of which has drawn criticism as overly sensationalistic. While CNN ranked 14th among all basic cable networks in 2019, then jumped to 7th during a major surge for the three largest cable news networks (completing a rankings streak of Fox News at number 5 and MSNBC at number 6 for that year), it settled back to number 11 in 2021. According to Nielsen, in June 2021 CNN ranked third in viewership among cable news networks, behind Fox News and MSNBC, averaging 580,000 viewers throughout the day, down 49% from a year earlier, amid sharp declines in viewers across all cable news networks. Īs of September 2018, CNN had 90.1 million television households as subscribers (97.7% of households with cable). Upon its launch in 1980, CNN was the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage and the first all-news television channel in the United States. It was founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel. It is owned by CNN Global, which is part of Warner Bros. The Cable News Network ( CNN) is a multinational news-based pay television channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.