THE REASONS TO WATCH TURNER’S CNN

It was just a crazy little 24-hour news network in 1980, barely under way and already ridiculed by ABC, CBS and NBC, struggling to survive in Atlanta as the tenuous creation of an off-the-wall communications maverick named Ted Turner.

Today, a month away from its sixth birthday, Cable News Network is an institution.

So much so that NBC not long ago showed an interest in acquiring CNN. Turned down by Turner, it began considering launching a ‘round-the-clock cable news network of its own.

Hence, the CNN concept is here to stay.

That’s not to say that CNN’s claim to be “the world’s most important network” doesn’t smack of Turner hyperbole. It’s premature to attach omnipotence to a network that is only available in its entirety to 36 million U.S. cable subscribers and shown only in slivers on 186 non-cable stations (including KTTV Channel 11 and KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles).

Non-viewers of CNN are missing a lot. There are so many reasons to watch.

One of them is the perceptive Moscow reporting of Stuart Loory, who will be succeeded as bureau chief in July by the highly able Peter Arnette. Loory will join CNN’s Washington staff.

Another reason is the efficient anchoring of Don Farmer and Chris Curle. Another is one of TV’s best interview shows, “Larry King Live.”

Another is one of TV’s worst interview shows, the grating “Crossfire,” a half-hour circus co-hosted by the posturing man you’d most love to hit in the face with a cream pie: Robert Novak. With so much of TV being pastel and mushy, it’s truly bracing to encounter a program like “Crossfire,” which at once angers you and clears your sinuses.

Yet another reason to watch CNN is its dependability. There is no faster route to breaking news than CNN. It’s not always good, but it’s always there .

It was there Friday, in Vancouver, with live coverage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana riding in an open convertible at Expo 86.

It was there recently, day in and day out, airing live telecasts of hearings by the Presidential commission probing the Challenger space shuttle explosion.

And it was there last Thursday, with an hour and 40 minutes of Soviet diplomat Vitaly Churkin’s extraordinary appearance before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee examining the Soviet nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

A Soviet verbally jousting with a congressional committee critical of his nation’s handling of the nuclear plant meltdown? You almost did a double take, especially as the highly articulate, mentally agile, earnest-appearing Churkin looked more stereotypically Yuppie than Commie.

Actually, Churkin told the congressional committee nothing America hadn’t already heard about Chernobyl from the Soviets. It was the stage and costuming that was different.

Suddenly, the Soviets had a Washington media performer with star appeal, someone who seemed even more disarmingly “American,” in a sense, than its American-reared Kremlin spokesman, Vladimir Posner.

Churkin was interviewed later on public TV’s “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” and tiny excerpts of his congressional testimony made the Thursday evening and Friday morning network newscasts. But the real kick was watching him live on CNN.

No, not the world’s most important network, but the world’s newsiest.