The video posted to a Gawker Media blog by a former network intern has been verified by numerous sources and was to be held ‘till end of world confirmed’

The video CNN planned to air at the end of the world has leaked online thanks to the work of a former intern at the network, who posted the video on Gawker Media’s Jalopnik blog on Monday.

The video had passed into CNN lore by the time Mike Ballaban, now an editor with Jalopnik, worked as an intern at the network in 2009. As rumor had it, the billionaire founder of CNN, Ted Turner, a man as known for his eccentricities as for his wealth and media legacy, had called for the preparation of a video to air in the event of nuclear holocaust.

The legend has circulated for decades, boosted by Turner’s own words in June 1980, when he said, “We’re gonna go on air June 1, and we’re gonna stay on until the end of the world. When that time comes, we’ll cover it, play Nearer My God to Thee and sign off.”

Ballaban told the Guardian he first saw the video while interning at CNN in 2009, after hearing about it from a professor who had ties with the network. The source who provided him the video also took screenshots of its home in CNN’s Mira archive, under the all-caps heading of “TURNER DOOMSDAY VIDEO – HFR till end of the world confirmed.” (HFR means “hold for release”, though the circumstances of what authority should, could or would confirm the apocalypse to a CNN employee, and how – and what that employee should consider when weighing whether to publish the video as he or she and the remnants of humanity stared down the ruination of our species, apparently via CNN broadcast – are unfortunately all omitted.)

The grainy video posted to Jalopnik on Monday, lasting little more than a minute, shows just what Turner said it would: a military band stands in formation between the columns of the Turner broadcasting mansion and the circular reflecting pool that lay on the lawn in the 1980s. One soldier raises a flag to the right, the musicians raise their instruments, and they begin the mournful hymn mentioned by Turner – said by survivors to be the last song played by the band on the Titanic. The low resolution obscures the faces of the musicians, who finish a brief version of the song and snap their instruments to attention. The video fades to black.

Ballaban said the video was well known at CNN six years ago and remains so today, although it took some effort to track down: “It’s one of those things you only look for if you’re a really bored intern or have a lot of time on your hands.”

Neither CNN nor a representative for Turner, who left his management roles at the network’s parent company in 2006, replied to requests for comment, but details of the video seem to corroborate it was actually made for broadcast during an apocalyptic event such as a nuclear holocaust – a very real threat in June 1980.

The video clearly takes place at CNN’s then headquarters in Georgia, the Turner mansion, identifiable by the distinctive, devil-horn shape of the facade above the door frame. The reflecting pool before which the band plays has been removed since the 1980s, but is clearly visible in photos and video of the mansion from the decade.

The band fits too: the band’s regiment, US Army Forces Command, is legible above an identifiable logo on the bass drum of a percussionist in the video; Georgia’s nearby Fort McPherson was base for US Army Ground Forces Command until 2011.

There is also indirect confirmation of the video’s authenticity through the diligent work of fact-checkers at the New Yorker, who in 1988 were presented with an article about Turner and his ultimate broadcast (paywall alert). Turner told the reporter (who wrote during the pre-byline era of the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section) that the rumors about the video were true, and then showed it in his Georgia office, after a speech about how “if we don’t become extinct by exhausting the planet’s natural resources, then we’ll destroy ourselves through nuclear war”.

Then Turner slipped a tape into a VCR, and explained that he knew “we would only sign off once”, so he asked a military band to play Nearer My God to Thee for a camera. When the tape began, Turner fled the room in a fit of emotion, but what the New Yorker reporter described watching is precisely the video posted by Ballaban. Turner popped his head back in the room after the clip was over and told the New Yorker: “I keep this tape around because when the world ends it’ll be over before we can say what we wanted to say. Before we can leave any final messages.”

No matter how one interprets Turner’s thinking, Ballaban pointed out that his idea shares something with the morbid but common practice of newspapers to prepare obituaries long before their subject’s deaths. Turner, with bizarre, melodramatic and oddly haunting flair, prepared an obituary for the world, ready to air.