A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[CNN needs another war
By MATTHEW FISHER
Sun's Columnist at Large
WASHINGTON
June 11, 2000
Hooray for CNN! It turned 20 last week. Alas, it wasn't much of an anniversary celebration for the television network which made O.J. Simpson a global pariah and transmitted gripping images of the Challenger shuttle explosion and the fireworks over Baghdad to more than 100 countries.
These are tough times for the Cable News Network. It has brand name recognition that most corporations would kill for, but its ratings in the U.S., which were never very good, have slipped badly in the past year. With only 225,000 of some 80 million American households tuning in most days, the ratings are now the worst they have been since 1991.
The Atlanta-based newscaster is facing competition at home from Fox News Channel and lots of other local, regional and national copycats and from the looming thousand-channel universe which CNN's creation helped trigger. CNN is also facing a serious challenge to its international supremacy from the much more authoritative and less jingoistic BBC World Service, from Fox affiliate Sky News and from other networks operated by NBC and Bloomberg, the business news service.
The only certainty at CNN these days is that it faces more uncertainty. Ted Turner lost partial control of CNN and his other cable networks when he sold them to Time Warner four years ago. The outspoken, somewhat eccentric billionaire's power was demoted to "senior adviser" last week, the first big tremor caused by Time Warner's US$165-billion merger with America Online, the world's biggest Internet service provider.
Although he has made a ton of money from the sale of his media empire, Turner is upset that he is no longer the big cheese at CNN. If there is a silver lining for his network, it is that with AOL's immense reach, the news channel may end up as the undisputed heavyweight video news champion of cyberspace, as it once ruled the satellite television news universe.
When you crunch the colossal numbers brought to the other players, CNN does not represent more than one or two per cent of the deal. Yet CNN's influence on the news gathering business, especially overseas, has been profound. There is not a foreign ministry, a tyrant or a news junkie anywhere who doesn't monitor it constantly.
Live coverage
Like millions of others, I marvelled at how seemingly easy it was for CNN to bring the planet live coverage of the Philippines' People Power Revolution, Tiananmen Square, Nelson Mandela's homecoming, the Persian Gulf war, the end of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire and all kinds of plane crashes and riots.
It was never that easy, of course. Acquiring visas and moving tons of finicky electronics into countries with terrible infrastructures and unhelpful officials requires military-style logistics. Nevertheless, on ugly stories such as Sarajevo, Somalia and Kosovo, CNN was almost impossible to beat.
One of CNN's problems is that it has never figured out how to keep audiences hooked when it didn't have something dramatic to feed its satellite dishes such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the bombardment of the Russian White House or the Columbine massacre. Although it has often done a good job on stories such as the civil wars in Chechnya and Rwanda and the Horn of Africa's endless war-related famines, CNN has been unable to keep audiences interested for very long.
Dramatic events will always be ratings leaders. But CNN might fare better during slack periods if it had more good reporters. Unless all hell has broken loose superstars such as Christianne Amanpour and Brett Sadler seem to disappear for weeks and months at a time.
Although CNN has other great reporters such as Jeanie Most in New York, John King in Washington and Richard Blystone in London, it has been saddled with some real turkeys in Latin America, Russia and the Far East. Its roster of anchors is equally uneven. Riz Kahn and Canadian Jonathan Mann are two of the better ones but others, including a few of the most well-known readers, vary in ability from fair to hopeless.
Part of the difficulty is money. Covering wars ain't cheap. After the big guns are paid their big bucks, there isn't much left in the pot to hire or keep other good people.
The one insurmountable problem is that it is tough to excite the planet for days at a time when the top story may be a flood in Italy, a forest fire in Australia or a drop in the Euro. Even America Online, with its deep pockets, will have trouble changing that.
Matthew can be e-mailed at 74511.357@CompuServe.com or visit his home page
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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