TV URBAN LEGEND: CNN didn't tell James Earl Jones that they were going to use him saying "This is CNN" for commercials.

Recently, the iconic James Earl Jones retired from his voice acting role as Darth Vader, and officially signed over his voice rights to Lucasfilm, so that it could use AI to continue to recreate Darth Vader's classic voice using Jones' legendary baritone voice for many years to come. Jones' success as Darth Vader opened up a whole new world to the actor. He recalled in his autobiography (written with Penelope Niven), Voices and Silences, about the impact Darth Vader had on his career, "The role set off a chain reaction of voices in my career. With Darth Vader, that mythical character, my voice came to be used more and more frequently as a voice of authority. It brought me a lot of commercial and voice-over work. The voice-over work led to more and more opportunities for narrations and on-camera commercials, with their own milieu and craft so different from movies and theatre."

One of those roles was doing the promos for CNN. Jones' voice booming "This is...CNN" became an iconic promo for the network.

Now, generally speaking, when it comes to trying to confirm or debunk a legend, if you've seen past legends, you'll notice that very often I look to the primary sources of the legends to see them address the stories. That works a lot of times, but sometimes, the primary sources inadvertently WERE the ones who STARTED the legend! That is the case, then, with James Earl Jones and an odd story involving CNN perhaps trying to sneak out a promo from Jones without paying him.

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DID CNN USE SURREPTITIOUS WAYS TO "STEAL" JONES' VOICE?

CNN first began to use Jones' voice in 1990, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the cable news channel. Rick Salcedo was a CNN senior vice president for marketing and creative services at CNN who was also the head of the network's on-air promotion and marketing from 1990 until he left the network in 2001. He was the guy who came up with the idea of having Jones do the promos. So when the promos began, they were specifically tied to the 10th anniversary of the network...

For a while there, people were unsure whether it WAS Jones or not, but eventually, it became evident that Jones was behind the promos. This, of course, was right when the Gulf War started and CNN became more important of a news source than ever before, with its 24 news coverage being a key way for Americans to follow the events in Iraq.and Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. So by 1991, these Jones promos were a REALLY big deal.

However, Jones then started telling people he never agreed to do them. He appeared on the TV interview series, Personalities, in 1991, where he claime, "I think it may have been a freebie. I might have been doing an interview like this, and (the CNN interviewer) said 'Oh, Mr. Jones, would you please read this? 'This is CNN.' And that's (how) it (happened)." So soon, the story became that CNN essentially stole Jones' voice without paying him. CNN insisted that it had contracted Jones, and paid him, and everything was complete above board.

Jones admitted a few years later to getting it wrong in a Toledo Blade article in 2001, at a point in the interview where he debunked a few fake stories. When it came to the CNN story, he noted, "That's more silliness. They reminded me I had a recording session, and they paid me well for it. One day, my son said, 'Papa, is that you?? And I said, 'I don't remember that.' It was such a simple thing, it wasn't a difficult thing to forget." So yeah, CNN reminded him that they HAD paid him, and he stopped saying it was a freebie.

Years later, he even recalled how he prepared for the promos, "I just emptied my mind, then filled it with the thought of all the hundreds of stories — tragic, violent, funny, touching — that could be following my introduction. And then I said, ‘This is CNN.’” He even pointed out how the CNN promos led to one of his favorite moments in his career, explaining, “You know the proudest moment of my career? Two air force pilots told me that when they landed after fighting in the Gulf War, the first thing they heard was my voice on CNN and knew they were safe. I was happy to be identified with the idea of soldiers being home.”

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SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY DID "STEAL" JONES' VOICE

Jones' story about CNN trying to get a "freebie" might sound hard to believe, but actually, that very thing happened in the past, when Jones' voice was used for years in the closing credits of Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Limbaugh revealed in 2016 why Jones' voice stopped being used:

I’ll tell you how that came to be. Johnny Donovan, who is the director of compression here, director of compression and production, ran into James Earl Jones, who at the time was doing those IDs for CNN. It’s about 25 years ago. I forget where Johnny ran into him, but it was something social. No, no, no. James Earl Jones was in the studio somewhere. That’s right. Okay. James Earl Jones was a guest at WABC, which is where the program originated back those days, and he was guesting on some other show and Johnny Donovan ran in and asked him to say, “You’re listening to the EIB Network.”

And he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it for a while. Finally Johnny Donovan, as director of compression, convinced him to do it. He didn’t know what it was, so he finally did it, and then a couple years later or I forget how it was a significant time after that, Justin, he found out about it and made us stop using it. He rescinded permission.

So, as you can see, Jones' concern wasn't out of nowhere, as people really DID try to do stuff like that during his career.

In any event, though, the legend is...

STATUS: False

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