- Victor Oladokun
I worked in News for the first ten years of my broadcast career. My colleagues and I produced a global newscast that was a worthy precursor to CNN in its early days. We reported facts and covered important and interesting news events from around the world. Today, broadcast journalism is still a part of my professional DNA.
Ten years after its inception, CNN was still bankrolled by its billionaire owner, Ted Turner, famously known as 'The-Mouth-of-the-South. The network's 'lucky' break coincided with the outbreak of the Gulf War in August 1990. It was the first major modern war covered live and in real time on global TV. Many still remember watching guided missiles flying down the streets of Baghdad.
Those were the days when veteran anchors such as Bernard Shaw, the upcoming Iranian-born Christiane Amanpour, Peter Arnet, and Wolf Blitzer, among many others, made CNN must-viewing in a news-starved world.
Back then, in the newly emerging 24-hour news culture, Breaking News was CNN's forte.
But along the way, some things changed.
1. The ideological biases of anchors and correspondents became much more evident. What was once subtle and more nuanced is now blatantly on display.
2. The network tilted sharply to the Left and soon began to see itself as the mirror opposite of the politically Right-leaning Fox News.
3. Today, CNN is no longer the global news monopoly it once was. In a fragmented media space, its market share has declined sharply. In Europe, #EuroNews is the most watched source of cable/satellite news. Russia has #RTNews; Qatar, #AlJazeera; China, #CGTN; France, #France24 etc. Each country has refused to surrender the global narrative to a network perceived to provide a primarily U.S. perspective.
In the United States, global viewers will be shocked to learn that in a nation of 350 million, only 600,000 (six hundred thousand) viewers tune in to watch CNN in any given hour, and even then only during major breaking News.
So where is CNN headed, at least over the next four years? If you ask me, I'd say down the tubes!
Why? Simply, CNN's obsessive compulsive 24-7 coverage of nothing else but Donald Trump. As if nothing else was going on in the world.
Somewhere along the line, CNN realized that Trump was good for ratings and profits. Post-election however, it has taken this coverage to ridiculous lengths. No wonder and to the dismay of international viewers, every small detail coming out of the White House is tagged 'Breaking News.'
If per chance aliens were to arrive from outer space today and watched only CNN, they would return with a very poor, jaundiced, extremely limited, and very dim view of the world we live in.
Personally, and as a professional, I am embarrassed by CNN and it's team of overpaid and underpaid anchors, correspondents, and talking heads, who collectively drink from the same ideological trough.
I find CNN's narrow coverage of the world (America) insulting. Is there nothing else of redeeming value going on in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Asia worth reporting or covering? Someone high up at CNN obviously doesn't think so!
Is CNN's infatuation with Trump the result of a global superiority complex, its Leftist ideological leanings, a business strategy, or simply a compulsive addiction and obsession?
I'm really not sure.
But this much I do know. On account of its current obsession, CNN's ratings and profitability are headed South. That is, if they haven't already.
There is much more going on in the world today that is meaningful, interesting, important, exciting, redemptive, and worth focusing on. Could someone somewhere tell the top brass at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Alas, they probably know something else that we all don't.
PS: Fox News is no different. Both networks represent what is most objectionable about an Americo-centric news perspective.
(- Victor Oladokun, February 2017)
