What's Happening at CNN

• 'By any definition, CNN globally remains the number one pan-regional news network', he says, adding that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the audience is not limited to English-speakers on overseas business trips. The old days of watching CNN in hotel rooms when there was nothing else to watch are over. Over 85 per cent of people watch it at home'.

• Fox insiders refer to CNN America's new President Jonathan Klein as 'Jon De-cline'. But Cramer is sanguine about the Fox threat. 'They are enjoying ratings success and I respect them for that. [But] Fox is not on the international broadcasting radar. It's not in direct competition. CNN had first-mover advantage and now its got a large number of domestic competitors. But Fox is not designed to be an international competitor to CNN and it never will be.'

• 'In the last few months, CNN has attracted more unique viewers than anyone else.' On an average monthly basis in 2005, CNN US had 64.9 million unique viewers while Fox News Channel had 57.9 million and MSNBC had 44.4m. 'We're in a battle for eyeballs, domestically and internationally,' but points out that, unlike rival services, CNN's international arm has been profitable since the late 1980s.

• 'It makes me kind of smile [that] people are still debating the advent of 24-hour news 25 years after it was invented', Cramer retorts. 'People consume news channels in a very different way. They only want it for 10 or 15 minutes. They want their fix of what's going on, to check the world hasn't ended, and they [switch over] to something else. Fixed-time bulletins, particularly in the US, are losing viewers in their millions.'

• What about the accusation that CNN promotes western assumptions and values, consciously or not? 'That is a charge which is levelled at the CNN, the BBC and others. I respect people who level it, but I completely refute it. We believe in no agenda, no viewpoint. We have to try very hard to put ourselves in the position of the audience we are broadcasting to. We have [local] reporters. It's rare that we do the same piece of reporting for CNN in the US and for CNN International.

# posted by ATN @ 9:48 PM

Nicole Johnston: When Ted Turner started talking about establishing a network that only ran news, a channel which he believed would become a democratising force around the world, people thought he was mad.

Walt Rodgers: The man who conceived of CNN, Ted Turner, was as unorthodox as you could get. In the oil business you would call him a wild-catter. He always ran against the grain and yet he was always brilliantly successful, whether as an Olympic yachtsman, or a broadcaster, or even when he made movies. He ran against the grain.

Nicole Johnston: What do you believe gave Ted Turner the vision to see 24-hour News?

Walt Rodgers: The answer’s in your question. It’s vision. I’m going to praise the man now, and he’s no longer my boss so I will praise him far more effusively than if he were my boss. Ted Turner differed from the rest of us, in that if we were two pilots in the cockpit of an airplane, one of us would look out and we would see as far as the horizon. Ted Turner looked out and saw around the curvature of the earth and beyond the horizon. You called it vision; I call it lookdown, shoot-down radar. He can see around the curvature of the earth and not just in television broadcasting. Furthermore, he was an American democrat (small ‘d’), and he believed in letting people loose, he believed in freedom within a corporation, he believed that freedom unleashed creativity and exuberance and energy, and when you freed those elements within the human spirit, you had a much better product and that’s why CNN started as it was.

# posted by ATN @ 1:31 PM

• Former BBC Chief Foreign Correspondent Martin Bell: CNN weren't taken seriously until it was clear they were on to something important. While individual correspondents were very good over the years, CNN's effect on other broadcasters wasn't altogether benign — imitators sacrificed accuracy for speed. They've defined rooftop journalism with crisply dressed correspondents standing on roofs not knowing as much about things as they should. They have taken several wrong turnings in recent years such as the way they covered 9/11 — they were like an animal caught in the White House headlights. Even though they run very different services internationally, the European and Middle East programmes they put out are too Americo-centric for me — you know they know about baseball but you're sure they don't know about cricket.

• BBC Head of New News Roger Mosey: They really were a force for good in news because 24-hour news was something that was crying out to happen. I have no patience with people who bemoan the 24-hour news culture, because in the old days something would happen at 10am and the first thing you would hear of it would be on the one o'clock news.
  You shouldn't underestimate the extent to which CNN was dominant 10 or 15 years ago. I was working in radio and if a big event happened we would literally opt in to CNN.

• CNN International Managing Editor Christ Cramer: Like many of my journalist colleagues, I had been complacent and thought the news was best served up at fixed points of the day in heavily crafted and refined news broadcasts. Oh, how we all laughed at Ted Turner's expense, even when events like the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986 or the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 forced television networks to go live — usually painfully late and sometimes hours after coverage had been broadcast around the world by CNN. As CNN celebrates 25 years of ground-breaking news coverage and technical innovation, I am proud to be part of its illustrious history.

• Sky News Head Nick Pollard: CNN started when it was the only one in a market that has now been squeezed, and it doesn't seem to have found a real voice. Fox News is of course in tune with the political temperature in the US and has worked to portray itself as separate from the establishment, whereas CNN looks very much part of the establishment — part of the furniture. CNN's founders were fantastic pioneers but you can't keep pioneering for 25 years. You settle into a routine but you need to keep re-energising yourselves. Certainly the version of CNN we get in Europe appears to be more routine, to have less energy.

# posted by ATN @ 8:30 PM

• Anderson Cooper 360- You're all alone, drifting aimlessly in the ocean. Discover what it takes to survive being lost at sea.
• Larry King Live- Sex-change surgery turned James Boylan, a husband and father, into Jennifer Boylan. She and her partner take your calls.
• NewsNight- Injured in a commuter train wreck, a man wrote a message to his family in his own blood. How's he doing now?

There is not any info on what the survivor story on Paula Zahn Now will be. Tonight's program description says: A chaplain complains of religious intimidation at the Air Force Academy. Find out why the Defense Department is investigating.

# posted by ATN @ 4:19 PM

• With a few weeks of perspective on it, do you have any second thoughts about the wall-to-wall coverage of the Terri Schiavo story? I thought it was a great cable story. The nature of twenty-four-hour news is that it is available when people have time to watch it. If you wanted to know what was going on in the Terri Schiavo case at eight at night, we did it, and we did it at ten o’clock for people who wanted to know then. People get all exercised about this, but it’s a perfectly appropriate way for us to do journalism—[especially with] this story, because it mattered on a lot of levels. We all confront these questions of life and death and living wills, and whether modern medicine will keep us alive past the point where we want. Or is that even an appropriate question—should we simply die at a time of God’s choosing? The story, on some level, touched everyone.
• What’s it like to have, say, five thousand bloggers checking your facts on the Internet? I have no problem at all with five thousand fact-checkers—the more, the merrier. We go on the air each night believing that we are factually accurate, so checking facts is not a problem to me. The problem with bloggers is, who’s checking the bloggers? One of the traditional and important roles of the press, which some people lovingly refer to as the mainstream media, was to act as gatekeeper. Not every fallacious or untrue accusation made it to air. These days, in the era of the Internet, the role of gatekeeper is pretty much gone.
• What do you think of the rise of popular opinionated news outlets like Fox News Channel?I’ve talked about this a lot in the last year. We seem to be in a time when too many people just want to hear that which they agree with—whether it’s Iraq or Terri Schiavo or anything, honestly. Fox is part of that, but, believe me, I hear it on the left all the time, too. For democracy—not to get too highfalutin on you, we are Minnesotans, after all—but for democracy, that’s a very dangerous place to be. Why is that? Because a successful democracy requires a citizenry that is informed. And to be informed requires that you understand the breadth of an argument or an issue. It’s not enough to just say, “They lied to us about the intelligence,” for example. Rarely are things that clear. Because I’m in the business of presenting complicated stuff in the most objective way I can, my world would be a lot easier if people sat back and listened to the range of argument, and did it in a kind of civil way rather than [saying], “He’s an idiot,” or, “He’s a traitor,” or, “He’s a whore.” These are all things I’ve probably been called today … over nothing. [And] this has been a good day!

# posted by ATN @ 11:41 AM

From Anderson Cooper's CNN site: "Tonight's show Hear an amazing story of survival as a wife watches helplessly while a chimpanzee nearly mauls her husband to death. Tune in at 7 p.m. ET."

An e-mailer has this to say: "Cooper/Klein have gone Ape-Shit! This is the THIRD time this has been on AC360. Why can't he just tell us the news?!"

If I remember correctly this is the story done by Heidi Collins. Heidi fans get ready, she'll be on tonight.

Additional: An e-mailer asks: "Why pick on Anderson? Are any of the other program's featured stories any less sensational and trashy? I think not."

Here's the entire prime-time line-up:

Anderson Cooper 360°: Hear an amazing story of survival as a wife watches helplessly while a chimpanzee nearly mauls her husband to death.

Paula Zahn NOW: A woman's first professional fight started with nerves and ended with a brutal, violent beating. Hear her story of survival.

Larry King Live: Back from the brink of death -- Actress Jane Seymour and others share what they saw on the other side.

NewsNight with Aaron Brown: A plane was more than 4,000 feet in the air when a woman's dad collapsed at the controls. Find out how the woman survived.

# posted by ATN @ 4:52 PM

Network News:

• Allow the viewer behind the screen
• Broadcast beyond the TV
• Form overseas alliances

Read the complete article HERE.

# posted by ATN @ 11:51 PM