S O U T H E R N
A U T H O R
"A Play for Power"
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So where do you get your news?
If it comes from CNN, get ready for more change you can believe in!
Launched in 1980, CNN was the first all-news cable network in this country. Along with many others, I recall thinking at the time, "24-hour news coverage? You have to be kidding." Old Ted must be off his rocker!
But he wasn't. He knew that news never stops happening.
During those early years, Ted Turner and CNN struggled mightily to fill a 24/7 format, but they persevered. Their original shows included Moneyline - its main financial show for over twenty years; Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields - one of television's best-watched discussion programs; Crossfire - a late night political debate and later Larry King Live - the highest rated and longest running program on CNN.
From the outset, it was "news on the cheap." Yet on January 28, 1986, CNN was the only network to broadcast the launch and explosion of the space shuttle Challenger as it happened. Then on October 14, 1987, they were there when Jessica McClure, an eighteen-month-old toddler that fell down a well in Midland, Texas was pulled out of the hole safe and sound. And the list goes on.
The New York Times once said, "If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture is worth many times that, and a live moving picture makes an emotional connection that goes deeper than logic and lasts well beyond the actual event."
That fact was proven when CNN showed us Saddam Hussein's surreal press conference with a few of the hundreds of Americans he was holding hostage. Again when we watched powerless as Los Angeles was looted and burned, and again when we witnessed OJ Simpson's slow ride in the white Bronco.
The defining moment for CNN however, came as their correspondents reported live from inside Baghdad even as American bombs were falling. It went something like this: "This is Bernie Shaw. Something is happening outside...Peter Arnett, join me here. Let’s describe to our viewers what we’re seeing ... The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated ...We’re seeing bright flashes going off all over the sky."
At that very moment, CNN came of age and all those folks that laughed at old Ted Turner quit laughing. The network now has thirty-six news bureaus around the world, more than 900 affiliated local stations, and several regional and foreign-language networks. Still, over the years CNN coverage has been superb.
Officials at the Pentagon have coined the term "the CNN effect" to describe the impact of CNN's real time, 24-hour news coverage on the decision-making processes of the American government, not to mention its influence over American elections.
But the days of CNN may be numbered. The freshness and frankness of those early days has been replaced by a scripted, censored, blown dry version of the news that reeks of a private agenda. As we saw this week, the world now has a choice: a spoon-fed Pablum version of the news; or a raw, uncensored version that once again leaves the viewer free to make his or her own judgments.
I'm speaking of course of the twitterized accounts from inside Iran that left nothing to the imagination. If you had the stomach for it, you saw the 26-year old Iranian protester gunned down. You saw sixteen year-old Neda die and bleed-out in the streets of Tehran. The reporting talent at CNN and Fox and all the rest aside, one would be hard pressed to duplicate the impact of this person-to-person connection. While outside reporters were prohibited from coming to the Iranian outrage, thanks to YouTube, Twitter and Face Book, the outrage was brought to them.
As was reported in a local newspaper, "There is something ... electrifying in watching Neda Agha-Soltan, blood-streaked and prostrate on the sidewalk, dying on camera and knowing this moment has not been framed and contextualized for you by a network news reporter but is, rather, the grief cry of some unknown person with a cellphone camera who is desperate for you to see what is happening, desperate for you to know."
Just as some twenty-nine years ago, CNN changed the way we receive and process the news, in that moment a few days ago, we may have witnessed the birth of a new medium, one more powerful and more genuine then any before.
While cyberspace is still the Wild West, filled with distortions and outright lies, no one can argue with the truth of what we've seen this week from inside Iran or the earlier videos of the beheadings by al Qaeda.
Closer to home, every night on the local news we see a new reality ... robberies as witnessed on surveillance cameras, apartment fires and tornadoes as captured on cell phones, even misdeeds by law enforcement recorded on dash-mounted cameras.
The columnist said, "... each of us has become a medium unto ourselves. Each of us can now reach the rest of us." When we witness violence and mayhem and even death in all its ugliness, we realize that in this digital age, nothing is done in secret, no one stands by themselves. Thanks to technology, we all witness man's inhumanity to man as well as to one another.
I'm told the New York Times has a slogan that reads "All the news that's fit to print." I suppose the modern-day version for all the mainstream media would be "all the news that supports our politics and our point of view."
Somewhere between CNN's founding in 1980 and today, when it comes to reporting the news, there's been a huge disconnect. As envisioned by our founders, the folks in the media were supposed to be the watchdogs of the government and the guardians of truth. But they've let us down. Thanks to the social networks and the proverbial man-on-the-street, once again the public has a media outlet that can bring light to the darkness and expose evil wherever it lurks.
Even if it never costs Wolfe Blitzer his job, I see this as one giant step forward.