Lynne Russell, a long-time CNN Headline News anchor who resigned last month, said "You say CNN and you think of Tom Johnson. He is CNN."
She called the announcement "not entirely unexpected."
As head of CNN since 1990, Johnson was the corporate face of CNN and was often looked to as a leader of news integrity while overseeing about 4,000 employees, many of them based at Atlanta headquarters. His turf spread from the main CNN news channel to CNN's Headline News, CNN.com, international networks and other operations.
After only a short time on the job, he made the call not to order Bernard Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett out of their Bahgdad hotel room to seek safety as US planes prepared to attack Iraq. The newsmen won CNN huge audiences with their first-hand accounts as bombs hit the city.
However, Johnson's tenure wasn't free of controversy. Johnson said he offered to resign three years ago after CNN retracted a controversial Operation Tailwind report, which claimed that US military forces had used sarin nerve gas in Laos in 1970. Some CNN staffers praised Johnson's actions while others believed he failed to back his staffers on the story.
Johnson was also in charge during the launch and rise of cable news competitors MSNBC and Fox News, which quickly undid CNN's monopoly on 24-hour cable news.
His move to CNN 11 years ago marked a sort of homecoming. He grew up in Georgia and graduated from the University of Georgia with a journalism degree. He served in the White House under Lyndon B. Johnson and became prominent in the newspaper industry, eventually serving as publisher and chief executive of the Los Angeles Times.
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