CNN

CNN is the principal television news outlet through which Malorie encounters the early spread of the Problem and the disintegration of public life. Its reports connect distant attacks to the danger closing in around her, but they cannot explain what people are seeing or offer a way to stop the resulting violence. As its coverage shifts from alarming updates to the weary presence of anchor Gabriel Townes, CNN becomes both a remnant of shared public information and a record of how little that information can do to protect anyone.

Early Reports and the Reach of the Crisis

When Shannon calls from the living room to report another television story, this time from Alaska, Malorie is in the bathroom trying to make her belly look smaller. The contrast establishes the split between the world’s expanding emergency and her private, immediate reckoning with pregnancy: she hears her sister, but the outside crisis does not yet matter as much to her as the possibility of a life inside her.

The news arrives amid a stream of violent stories already circulating online. Reports from Russia describe a passenger attacking his friend on a snowy highway, a mother burying her children, and a filmed axe attack in Omsk. Malorie initially regards the first reports’ prominence as the Internet’s arbitrary way of making random events famous, but the accumulating incidents make that explanation harder to sustain. CNN’s report from Alaska brings the crisis into American television news, extending its reach beyond the stories she has tried not to follow.

A later broadcast reports an incident in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula while Malorie is calling Henry Martin. The sisters then hear that an elderly couple from Iron Mountain have been found hanging from a tree in nearby woods, their belts used in the deaths. The report lands against Malorie’s worry about her parents, whom she has been thinking of and trying to reach. The news does not resolve that personal uncertainty; instead, it makes the danger feel closer to the people she loves.

Television as a Window on Public Breakdown

During the first days of the crisis, the television becomes part of a makeshift information center in Malorie’s home. She watches it while the computer remains open on a desk and the radio plays softly, an arrangement that makes the room feel like a war room. The broadcasts have lost their ordinary rhythms: there are no commercials, and newscasters pause as updates arrive, visibly surprised while on air. The screens keep Malorie connected to unfolding events, but their unsettled presentation also shows that the institutions reporting the crisis are struggling to keep pace with it.

CNN’s anchor Gabriel Townes is among the faces through which that strain becomes visible. He has been on television repeatedly, and the network has disclosed that many reporters have stopped coming to the station; Townes has been sleeping there. His new slogan is “We’ll go through this together,” but his appearance contradicts the assurance: his hair is no longer perfect, he wears little makeup, and he looks exhausted and sunken as he delivers the news. The professional composure associated with a news anchor gives way to the visible cost of continuing to report.

One quiet update makes the collapse suddenly local. Townes discusses a beheading in Toledo, less than eighty miles from where Malorie is watching. The report comes without graphics, music, or inserts. Its subdued presentation does not make the event less frightening; it strips away the usual television packaging and leaves the news starkly close to home.

Warnings Without Answers

CNN’s reports are part of an information environment in which the scale of violence grows faster than public understanding. The Internet circulates shocking incidents, television anchors relay new cases, and the government’s on-screen instructions direct people to lock their doors, cover their windows, and avoid looking outside. A national curfew is mandated. Yet no one has answers about what is causing the events. The reports establish a pattern—people are seeing something and then harming others or themselves—without identifying what is being seen or how to survive it.

As the crisis worsens, Malorie interprets the government’s warnings as a blackout: the world outdoors is being shut down. CNN’s coverage offers a view of that shutdown but no route beyond it. In the same house where Malorie watches the broadcasts, a thud from upstairs interrupts the news; she calls to Shannon, receives no answer, and turns the television down. The movement from the national report to silence inside the home makes the broadcast’s limits palpable: it can describe violence elsewhere, but it cannot tell Malorie what has happened in the next room.

From Public Broadcast to Lasting Record

The function of news changes as ordinary communications fail. At the Riverbridge safe house, Tom explains that the Internet is down, cell phones have stopped working, and mail and newspapers no longer arrive. The local power plant still runs on hydroelectricity, leaving electricity available for a time, but reliable connection to the outside world has largely disappeared. CNN’s early broadcasts belong to a period when the crisis can still be watched as public news; later, the survivors’ remaining radio voice is Rodney Barrett, whose rambling broadcasts provide no new information yet remain their last link to the outside world.

The later survival network uses sound for a different purpose from broadcast news. At the community Rick leads, a motion-activated speaker plays a repeated recording to guide arrivals toward the facility, replacing continuous reporting with a local signal tied to a specific route and moment. This contrast clarifies CNN’s place in the novel’s media landscape: its broadcasts make the catastrophe visible and public, while later communication survives as intermittent voices and practical audio cues. CNN can announce the breakdown, but it cannot restore the shared world its reporting once presupposed.