CNN is its own disaster: How a perversely immature news channel blew its opportunity
Fox News and MSNBC have given the network an open field in which to run. This is what it's done instead
Topics: Al Jazeera America, Cable News, CNN, Editor's Picks, Fox News, Jay Leno, Jeff Zucker, malaysia airlines, Media Criticism, MSNBC, Natural Disasters, tragedy, Media News, Politics News
A month after its launch, on June 29, 1980, the New York Times reviewed Ted Turner’s embryonic cable channel. It was a fairly positive write-up, in which the critic presciently identified the outfit’s bread and butter. “It is evident so far that disasters are perhaps the best news the network can hope for,” he wrote. “Volcanoes, airplane crashes and riots are ideally suited to CNN’s gritty, live coverage.” For CNN, he continued, “disasters offer a justifiable means of filling time.”
Nearly 34 years later, very little has changed.
It’s hardly news anymore that CNN has gone all in on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished on March 8. Jon Stewart succinctly summed up the coverage as “occasionally pointing at shit and wondering what it is.” It ought to be said that the disappearance of the plane, while tragic, is not of great geopolitical or economic significance. Should the plane be found, Malaysia will not invade Iraq or Afghanistan. The country will simply grieve.
And yet here we are, more than six weeks later — during which time very little progress has been made on the search — and CNN’s home page appears stuck in amber:
Perhaps in preparation for the day Flight 370 is found — and ceases to be of interest — CNN has moved on to a fresher, equally horrific hobbyhorse, the capsized South Korean ferry. (The network seems to have a thing for exploiting Asian fatalities for fun and profit.) The incident has given CNN enough material for innumerable stories, including a segment asking: Was South Korean “culture” to blame for the demise of the passengers? (Spoiler: It was not.) A few days later, in what I hope is the nadir of this coverage, an anchor named Rosa Flores chose to fill airtime by giving viewers a horrifically inadequate approximation of what it would be like to be trapped in a sea vessel and drown. “This is a full-blown ship simulator!” squealed Rosa Flores.
The great perversity is that CNN, with revenue of about $1 billion last year and profits of approximately $200 million, could be an effective purveyor of news. It’s not as if there is no precedent for a cable channel doing just that. Al Jazeera America, for example, has been exceptional. Outside of maybe the Guardian, no news organization in the world has done a better job of keeping viewers abreast of what’s going on. (Alas, AJAM has not so far been a commercially successful venture.) And CNN should, in theory, have an open field in which to run. Fox, as is often said, is the public relations arm of the Republican Party (or, as Gabriel Sherman has magnanimously put it, “a political machine that employs journalists”) and MSNBC is largely devoted to commentary. Meanwhile, CNN maintains “by far the largest bureau system among the three major news channels.”