Altering News Norms–the Influence of CNN (3)
Because CNN broadcasts around the globe, it has become a vehicle for airing the competing claims of various nations and their leaders. Voices previously unlikely to be heard by U.S. audiences have received airplay. In September 1990, for example, CNN carried a speech by Jordan’s King Hussein appealing for moderation by all sides in the Kuwait-Iraq crisis. King Hussein warned that the world was slipping into war in the Middle East just as it had slipped into World War I. Within days, the Saudi ambassador to the United States Hublot Replica Watches was on CNN delivering a rebuttal to Hussein’s speech. The appropriate analogy, argued the ambassador, was the role Hitler’s aggression played in starting World War II. One index of power is the ability to have one’s message heard; by that measure, CNN has empowered countries and leaders that otherwise would play a smaller role on the international stage. In short, CNN has accelerated the emergence of a multipolar world.
At the same time, it has become a medium of information for world leaders themselves. Message after message from Saddam Hussein to the world indicated that he had been following world reaction. The presumed channel: CNN. And in August 1989, the New York Times reported a presidential aide noting that President Bush was considering ways to respond to the threat to U.S. hostages in Lebanon while in his study “watching CNN.” The president’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, told the reporter, “CNN has opened up a whole new communications system between governments in terms of immediacy and directness. In many cases, it’s the first communication we have.”
Because of its on-the-spot coverage of the bombing of Baghdad as the war in the Persian Gulf began, scores of CBS, NBC, and ABC affiliates dumped their network coverage in favor of CNN. For example, WCCO, a CBS affiliate in Minneapolis, routinely interrupted the CBS Evening News to switch to CNN, and in a close three-way ratings race for number 1, WCCO’s ratings clobbered those of its NBC and ABC affiliate rivals during the opening week of the Persian Gulf War.
CNN’s dominance of news coverage of the opening days of the war may have been a turning point in television news, shifting power from ABC, NBC, and CBS and toward CNN. “The gulf crisis is a defining event,” said S. Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. “It’s as if history is conspiring to help CNN.” Larry Gerbrandt of Paul Kagan Associates, cable television analysts, agreed: “No one will ever doubt their advertising line again–that CNN is the most important network in the world. This is the greatest journalism story of the decade.”
EXERCISE: Examine the CNN pictures on the next page. What is memorable about each? What is newsworthy? What facets Hublot Big Bang Replica of the news story does each picture feature? What difference, if any, does it make that the events captured in these pictures were broadcast live?
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