Tag Archives: CNN

Is quitting Reuters hurting CNN?

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On the one hand, they’re put­ting money into aggress­ive expan­sion of the news­gath­er­ing base (good stra­tegic move), on the other — people are start­ing to notice their expos­ure. Take this from Fol­low The Media:

It was 1100 CET (0500EST) and hav­ing heard on the radio of bomb­ings in Algi­ers FTM switched on CNN Inter­na­tional to see what was going on. But instead of a news­cast there was just a minute or so of old head­lines, abso­lutely noth­ing about Algi­ers, and then it was onto yet another repeat of the network’s inter­view with the Nobel Peace Prize Laur­eates. Switch to BBC World, and they’re all over Algi­ers, their strap line is quot­ing Reu­ters say­ing there are large num­bers of dead and injured, and they are talk­ing live on-air to someone in Algiers.

Makes one ques­tion how there could be so much dif­fer­ence in start­ing up on the day’s biggest story. Could it be that BBC sub­scribes to more news agency sources than does CNN? As a viewer it seems we get what the news net­work pays for.

Al Jazeera English: an email exchange

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I wrote an anniversary review of Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish recently, point­ing out the dilemma of run­ning a glob­ally “progressive-minded” news chan­nel on behalf of a des­potic régime.

Here is an email exchange with someone at Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish in Doha, respond­ing to that piece:

…I am a tad dis­ap­poin­ted with your recent Press Gaz­ette art­icle on ‘Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish — 1 year on.’

“An expens­ive attempt to buy silence”? Check your facts. [Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish has] repor­ted on stor­ies unflat­ter­ing to the Qatari régime — the plight of abused domestic work­ers, and the level of human traf­fick­ing to name but two … Al Jaz­eera Arabic has done an entire pro­gramme ques­tion­ing Qatar’s régime for allow­ing a US Army base on its ter­rit­ory, com­plete with phone-ins. I can safely say no journ­al­ist involved was imprisoned/deported/beheaded as a result.

You go so far as to quote the US State Depart­ment: “On domestic issues, Al Jaz­eera covered local news gen­er­ally only if there was an inter­na­tional angle to it.” Yes? And? Al Jaz­eera only cov­ers MOST stor­ies if there’s an inter­na­tional angle to them. It’s also ques­tion­able to quote the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, given their top man actu­ally con­sidered bomb­ing Al Jaz­eera Arabic. Press free­dom indeed.

So what stor­ies do you think we’ve missed? Send us a list — the plan­ning depart­ment is always glad of edit­or­ial suggestions.

My reply: Hmmm. I guess I’ll have to wait for the invest­ig­a­tions into how the al-Thanis make and spend their money — would AJE ever go near the Qatari royal fam­ily? Or another Gulf royal fam­ily? The BAe investigations?

There are a few story ideas in the (partly state-sponsored) human rights review quoted here.

Self-censorship is a cri­ti­cism I’ve heard from people in Qatar, and in the Arab media gen­er­ally (and about the Arab media generally).

I don’t hold a torch for the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, but when Qataris vote the al-Thanis out, or impeach them, or their term of office expires — let me know.

There is a fun­da­mental dilemma in a “pro­gress­ive” TV sta­tion fun­ded by a des­potic régime (even an enlightened des­pot­ism). I don’t think it’s wrong to point that out.

And I don’t think the cov­er­age you men­tion (some of which oth­ers had also told me of) in any way redresses that bal­ance or answers that fun­da­mental ques­tion — for me. You obvi­ously feel dif­fer­ently.

Yes, Qatar is a non-democratic régime. Yes, there are aspects of civil infringe­ments here that right-minded people like you or I deplore — not being able to leave the coun­try without offi­cial per­mis­sion, for instance. But the point is, Qatar’s lead­er­ship is essen­tially a benign régime, and the issues here are simply not as grip­ping as what’s hap­pen­ing in Pakistan, Myan­mar, Geor­gia, Mogadishu, Sudan, etc etc.

If we were called Doha Today I could under­stand your beef — but we’re not. We’re a global news organ­isa­tion. And let’s face it, all news organ­isa­tions oper­ate edit­or­ial judge­ments when it comes to select­ing which stor­ies to broad­cast… the duller stuff doesn’t make it. That’s not spe­cial to Al Jaz­eera. How many Qatar stor­ies have you seen on BBC World or CNN? Exactly.

We’ve done ster­ling work upset­ting lots of regimes — oper­at­ing under­cover in Myan­mar, for instance.

And we don’t shy away from polit­ical stor­ies involving this region. We’ve done the BAe story. We’ve ques­tioned the point of the GCC, and the effic­acy (or lack of) of the Arab League. And we’ve covered the grass-roots cam­paign for demo­cratic reform across the Gulf — I did that one, so I can assure you they got good airtime.

Would we ever be stopped from invest­ig­at­ing the Al Thanis? I’m not say­ing it couldn’t hap­pen. If a big juicy royal scan­dal erup­ted on our door­step, would we be pre­ven­ted from report­ing it? Or pressed into report­ing it a cer­tain way? Maybe, who knows? And if we are, I prom­ise you I will be straight on the phone to you. But I can say unequi­voc­ally that hasn’t happened so far…

Review: Al Jazeera English — one year on

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Here’s a piece I wrote for Press Gaz­ette on Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish, one year on.

In the gar­dens of Ver­sailles you can visit a charm­ing monu­ment to France’s con­ser­vat­ive, construction-crazed 18th-century mon­archy. It’s the Petit Hameau, an ideal­ised vil­lage built at the whim of Marie Ant­oinette as a way of “con­nect­ing” with the great unwashed. Nicely scrubbed cows chewed the cud on its phoney pas­tures. The cows man­aged to avoid the guillotine.

In the desert city of Doha there’s a rather less charm­ing monu­ment to Qatar’s con­ser­vat­ive, construction-crazed mon­archy. The stu­dios of Al Jaz­eera, a little media vil­lage built at the whim of the country’s ruler. In place of cows, presenters like Sir David Frost and Rageh Omaar are allowed to chew the fat. But will it save Qatar’s mini-depotism?

Frost, at least, has demon­strated exactly why the BBC gave him the chop. More people see an actor play­ing him in the West End than watch him on TV. Omaar has freel­anced across other chan­nels, without becom­ing a recog­nis­able Al Jaz­eera brand.

But then presenters rarely do suc­ceed on news chan­nels, unless you look at, say, Keith Olber­mann on MSNBC, Lou Dobbs on CNN, and Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. So, a year on, is Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish any­thing more than a mag­ni­fi­cent bil­lion dol­lar folly?

Not if you’re Al Jaz­eera boss Wadah Khan­far. He calls Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish “the voice of the South.”

The channel’s tire­less MD Nigel Par­sons puts it dif­fer­ently. He says it is seen by opin­ion formers. It is cer­tainly posi­tioned as a chan­nel for elites rather than the oppressed. It is strong on for­eign news and polit­ics, and many of its key per­son­nel are steeped in the pub­lic ser­vice val­ues of Brit­ish tele­vi­sion news.

First anniversary talk is not about its mis­sion or the stor­ies it has broken, but of car­riage – who is pip­ing or beam­ing the chan­nel into homes. It looks like AJE will finally get into India – expect an announce­ment tied to the birth­day on 15 Novem­ber, but it will face tough com­pet­i­tion from a bois­ter­ous mar­ket crowded with home-grown news channels.

But in the world’s two biggest English-speaking mar­kets, Bri­tain and the USA, AJE has barely registered among view­ers, and in the US it is still strug­gling to be seen at all.

A hun­dred mil­lion people now have the oppor­tun­ity of watch­ing it, but that’s far from the num­bers actu­ally tun­ing in. Put­ting any cred­ible fig­ure to view­ers is all but impossible – in the Middle East itself, the lack of an accur­ate rat­ings sys­tem has long held back the devel­op­ment of an effect­ive advert­ising mar­ket. But you have to be care­ful when it comes to ask­ing people what they really want.

For any­one like me, who’s spent their life work­ing in tele­vi­sion journ­al­ism, it’s hard not to see any invest­ment in the medium as reason for cel­eb­ra­tion, euphoria even. Admit­tedly, invest­ment is nor­mally a word pre­ceded by the words ‘return’ and ‘on’.

By his own reck­on­ing, it took Ted Turner five years to make CNN prof­it­able. Qatar National Bank, the station’s cur­rent backer, must be tak­ing a pretty long view. Will Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish ever make money? My kids might find out.

But the euphoria that greeted that invest­ment comes with a bonus that might interest Qatar’s ruler, and it’s a bonus that begins pay­ing back right from day one – silence.

And the silence comes easy, because Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish looks and sounds slick and pro­fes­sional. It cov­ers stor­ies oth­ers ignore, and shines a light on corners of the world most tele­vi­sion news out­fits are con­tent to leave unlit. Friends and former col­leagues – tal­en­ted and able indi­vidu­als – have found work there. Why rock the boat?

But the silence is wrong, because Qatar is a micro-state where, by pop­u­lar con­sent, there is no pop­u­lar con­sent. Only a quarter of its 800,000 inhab­it­ants have cit­izen­ship. Elec­tions prom­ised for this year have yet to mater­i­al­ise. No one’s likely to be stand­ing on a plat­form of con­fis­cat­ing royal assets.

This is the US State Department’s latest assess­ment of press free­dom in Qatar. It’s worth quot­ing at length:

“Journ­al­ists con­tin­ued to self-censor due to social and polit­ical pres­sures when report­ing on gov­ern­ment policies, the rul­ing fam­ily, and rela­tions with neigh­bour­ing states. There were reports that secur­ity author­it­ies threatened both indi­vidu­als and organ­isa­tions against pub­lish­ing undesir­able articles.

“Although cit­izens expressed many of their views freely and in pub­lic, they avoided dis­cuss­ing sens­it­ive polit­ical and reli­gious issues. The much lar­ger for­eign pop­u­la­tion did not express itself as freely or as publicly.

“Al Jaz­eera and the gov­ern­ment both claimed the chan­nel to be inde­pend­ent and free of gov­ern­ment influ­ence, but it was gov­ern­ment sub­sid­ised and avoided crit­ical com­ment­ary of gov­ern­ment policies. On domestic issues, Al Jaz­eera covered local news gen­er­ally only if there was an inter­na­tional angle to it.”

That is the silence. So what, you might say? Isn’t it enough that the sta­tion is a force for change? Isn’t being ‘the voice of the South’ suf­fi­cient? And there’s the rub.

Tele­vi­sion tra­di­tion­ally has had to come to many accom­mod­a­tions to stay in busi­ness. CNN found that out in Bagh­dad dur­ing the first Gulf War. Is the silence about Qatar just one of those prag­matic arrange­ments that are out­weighed by the bene­fits of simply broad­cast­ing? I wish I thought the answer was yes.

But you can’t export val­ues you’re unwill­ing to adopt in your own back­yard. We don’t always live up to our own stand­ards in Brit­ish and Amer­ican TV journ­al­ism, but the only thing stop­ping us is ourselves, not the fear of offend­ing a régime whose caprices we can only second guess.

Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish needs to cause trouble in the king­dom it calls home if it really wants to be thought of as some­thing more than a very expens­ive attempt to buy silence.

What price CNN? Hardball on Israeli cable…

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Want to see the busi­ness battle over news in the raw? You have to go to Israel, where they hold these nego­ti­ations in pub­lic. This is from Haaretz:

Every few months in the past two years, the HOT cable com­pany has announced it will stop broad­cast­ing pop­u­lar tele­vi­sion chan­nels like BBC Prime, Hall­mark and National Geographic.

After these announce­ments, HOT would resume nego­ti­ations, one of the sides would fold (each com­pany said the other did) and the chan­nels would still be aired.

Now it’s CNN’s turn. As in pre­vi­ous cases, HOT is demand­ing that the news net­work reduce its prices, while the net­work, in this case Turner Broad­cast­ing Sys­tem, says it has reduced it as much as possible.

If noth­ing changes, CNN will dis­ap­pear from HOT sub­scribers’ tele­vi­sion screens on mid­night, Octo­ber 31 when its con­tract runs out.

This cut in HOT’s chan­nel sup­ply comes in the wake of com­pany CEO David Kaminitz’s state­ment that he intends to reduce the costs of con­tent pro­viders by NIS 200 mil­lion. The cost sav­ing does not ensure a reduc­tion in sub­scrip­tion price.

The last time HOT dis­cussed tak­ing chan­nels off the air, it tried to make a ges­ture, per­haps as a diver­sion, to add other chan­nels — a Chinese one and a Geor­gian one. This did not work. The view­ers wanted Hall­mark, National Geo­graphic and espe­cially BBC Prime.

HOT’s pre­vi­ous nego­ti­ations with Turner Broad­cast­ing ended badly. One day, TCM and Car­toon net­works dis­ap­peared from the broad­cast­ing sched­ule. Dur­ing the talks on these chan­nels’ terms, the issue of CNN was also broached, but HOT decided it was too import­ant to dis­con­tinue broad­cast­ing. Now the con­tract with the inter­na­tional news net­work is end­ing and sud­denly it seems less important.

“We don’t break signed agree­ments,” says Yossi Lubaton, HOT’s mar­ket­ing VP. “But now, when the con­tract with CNN has been opened, we tried to nego­ti­ate and the price they’re demand­ing is hun­dreds of per­cent higher than the other chan­nels. All the con­tent pro­viders under­stood that our mind was made up, but CNN chose to con­duct a PR cam­paign. They’re play­ing a stu­pid child­ish game instead of nego­ti­at­ing. We’ve never con­duc­ted ‘take it or leave it’ nego­ti­ations, but their way led to a breakdown.”

A Turner Broad­cast­ing spokes­man said “for years, CNN has cooper­ated with HOT and reduced its prices. But this has become a vicious cycle of threat­en­ing demands on HOT’s part. We’ve reached a point where we can no longer provide a ser­vice, we can­not cover costs and are los­ing money. It’s simple busi­ness logic.”

Neither side is will­ing to cite accur­ate prices. A HOT spokes­man says: “We’re traded on the stock mar­ket. You can see our expenses on con­tent have gone down.”

The reduc­tion may be seen on the stock mar­ket, but not in sub­scrip­tion fees. HOT says it finally decided not to dis­con­tinue broad­cast­ing National Geo­graphic and BBC Prime after the last clash with them, not because of the public’s objec­tion but because the chan­nels agreed to reduce their prices by 30 to 40 percent.

A National Geo­graphic spokes­man said this fig­ure was far from the price finally agreed on.

HOT’s spokes­man said CNN still believes it is as pop­u­lar as in the first Gulf War, but today its view­ing has dwindled con­sid­er­ably. Today more view­ers in Israel and the world watch Fox News, an Amer­ican, not inter­na­tional com­pany, he said. HOT did not provide fig­ures to sub­stan­ti­ate this claim.

A CNN sur­vey shows a dif­fer­ent pic­ture. Some 500 people were asked which inter­na­tional news chan­nel they would watch dur­ing a news­flash about a world crisis, such as the demon­stra­tions in Myan­mar or shoot­ing on a pres­id­en­tial con­voy in Pakistan. The inter­viewees were not asked to choose from a num­ber of chan­nels, and 40.3 per­cent said they would turn first to CNN. The sur­vey indic­ates that CNN leads the inter­na­tional chan­nels broad­cast in Israel. Only 6.6 per­cent chose BBC World as their first option. Fox News was rated third; only 2 per­cent chose Sky News.

Lubaton is one of the lat­ter. Sky News is his favour­ite for­eign chan­nel in the event of an inter­na­tional crisis.

CNN receives no state sup­port and a Turner offi­cial said it was “required to pro­duce its own income.” As for Fox News, Lubaton is not at all con­cerned that the view­ers receive their inter­na­tional inform­a­tion from a net­work known for its polit­ical bias and Amer­ican iden­tity. In the United States, Fox is seen a great suc­cess, he says, so “it’s not such a bad channel.”

Lubaton adds that HOT offers view­ers four inter­na­tional news chan­nels — France 24 (an English-language French net­work), Sky, Fox and BBC World. “That’s quite a lot,” he said. “We don’t want to take CNN off the air and we don’t under­es­tim­ate it, but we will have to make a rational decision in exist­ing mar­ket con­di­tions. In our estim­ate, a very small num­ber of view­ers will be hurt. We will be happy if CNN decides to enter negotiations.”

A Turner Broad­cast­ing spokes­man said it was forced to react to HOT’s media cam­paign on the sub­ject. HOT’s cri­ti­cism of CNN derives from com­mer­cial con­sid­er­a­tions and does not reflect the channel’s pop­ular­ity in Israel and world­wide. HOT is find­ing fault with the product in order to reduce its price, he said.