e-Vents

[ Tuesday ]

 

CNN on the Hot Seat

Ted Turner began his professional career in an outdoor advertising company that his father founded. After a few years, Turner decided to pursue other ventures, and acquired a UHF television station in Atlanta. WTBS soon began uplinking to orbiting satellites and, because of a national audience, charged more for advertising rates than other local stations.

With the success of the 'Superstation', he founded the 24/7 news channel, Cable News Network. Struggling at first just to fill airtime with newsworthy stories, the network caught on as cable and satellite subcriptions grew, ultimately becoming the de facto standard for breaking news. Who isn't familiar with the booming voice of James Earl Jones announcing 'This is CNN'? Success of the brand helped spin off other programs such as Headline News, Larry King Live, etc.

Today, things are a bit tougher.

The Internet boom enabled AOL to make a deal to acquire Time-Warner, which had already acquired CNN and other Turner properties. Things have gone downhill since then. While I have always thought that AOL was a house of cards, and also one without any value proposition, subscribers plunked down money every month to have their hands held into the mysterious universe of the Internet. In the past two years, investors have run for the exits, and all of the AOL/TW executives are underwater with their options.

To compound the problems, other networks, namely Fox, have jumped into the lead with their programming. Conservatives would argue that it occurred because CNN had been dubbed the 'Clinton News Network' for eight years, seemingly supporting the former President in all of his escapades. Last week, with the fall of Baghdad in hand, the top news executive at CNN, Eason Jordan, wrote in an Op/Ed piece in the New York Times that CNN had known of atrocities in Iraq for the past 12 years, but failed to report many of these for fear of retribution from Iraq.

Jordan explained that his reporters had been threatened, and some of CNN's Iraqi sources faced probable death if CNN reported some of their stories during the regime of Saddam Hussein. With the regime apparently over, Jordan stepped forward.

CNN, and Jordan in particular, have been soundly rebuked by critics. Media pundits and journalism professors at well-respected universities have cried 'foul'. The idea, they argue, that news reporters 'collaborated' with the enemy in order to gain preferred access to information was unethical, unprofessional, and goes against the rule of objectivity in news gathering. Reporters in Iraq had minders escorting them anyway, and were not free to transmit stories without Iraqi censors. Why not just leave, and report from adjoining countries, if that was the case?

Jordan has stated in several interviews since his disclosure that his people did not compromise themselves or their stories, but respected media observers disagree. This seems to be just one more bit of bad news for the network and its parent company. It is well known that AOL/TW has been shopping its non-core 'assets' such as the sports franchises, and it has already lost a good number of its top executives due to the post-merger stock decline. I think that a few more heads are getting ready to roll with this most recent disclosure.

MM [18:41]