Saturday, January 08, 2005
LA Times: "CNN Has Renewed Its Commitment to the Primacy of Hard News"
Source: LA Times Here's a great article from Tim Rutten of the LA Times discussing the coverage of the tsunami disaster. Below is a portion of the article.
The experience of the three American cable news networks was particularly instructive. All of them drew more viewers, but the most dramatic increase went to CNN, the most traditional and — shall we say, mainstream — of the trio. In the week after the tragedy, CNN's daily audience increased 38%, while its prime-time viewers grew by a striking 46%. Fox News, cable's ratings leader, experienced more modest gains of 20% and 25%, respectively.
There's a simple explanation for the disparity. While Fox is a series of chat shows linked by snippets of fragmentary information, much of it derived from other sources, CNN not only has maintained its domestic and international news-gathering capabilities, but — in recent weeks — also has renewed its managerial commitment to the primacy of hard news. Because it was able to draw on the resources of its own Bangkok, Indonesian, New Delhi and Hong Kong bureaus, as well as CNN International's network of regular stringers, CNN had more than 80 journalists on the scene within days of the disaster. Fox News had 30. The BBC, whose audience grew at an even greater rate than CNN's, had more than 100 people in the field. The battered BBC had audience increases of as much as 50% for some of its regular nightly news programming.
Real news is covered in the same way that real wars are won: by putting enough boots on the ground.And only the much-maligned mainstream media have the ability to put those boots where they belong. In the face of such evidence, it's time to consider what an America — or, for that matter, a world — without mainstream media really would look like.
# posted by ATN @ 11:54 AM 
