CNN changed the media landscape by becoming the first network to provide 24-hour rolling news. Now it’s the victim of another revolution.
The place was the Al-Rashid hotel in downtown Baghdad. The year was 1991.
As allied forces pounded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on the opening night of the first Gulf War, a worldwide audience of more than a billion people watched as two dashing reporters, New Zealander Peter Arnett and American Bernard Shaw, rushed to and from the roof of the building with live updates from the heat of the battle.
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, exactly 20 years ago this week, didn’t just set in motion the events which led to Operation Desert Storm.
It also kick-started the first war of the rolling news era. Arnett and Shaw’s broadcast, for an Atlanta-based organisation called Cable News Network, or CNN, was the most-watched live event, outside the sporting arena, in the history of mankind.
In the ensuing weeks and months, satellite dish sales soared. The world became addicted to real-time TV news. CNN’s profits soared, making its mouthy owner, Ted Turner, disgustingly wealthy. Even “Stormin”‘ Norman Schwarzkopf admitted to watching it in his desert bunker. Fast forward two decades and CNN was making a very different type of news.
In June, Larry King announced he had decided to hang up his red braces and quit the nightly talk show he’d been hosting for 25 years.
At age 76, he wanted to put family first and enjoy “more time for my wife and I to get to the kids’ little league [baseball] games”.
But when he made the announcement, hardly anyone was watching. In his show that night, King failed to mention one pertinent fact: after years of gentle decline, viewing figures for his 9pm show were falling off a cliff: down 36 per cent in the previous 12 months to an all-time low of just over 650,000. If he hadn’t decided to jump, he may have been pushed.
Across the board, audiences are deserting the station in droves.
A decade ago, CNN was the heavyweight champion of its field: reliable, prestigious and pulling more viewers than both its major commercial rivals combined. Today, it still has a blue chip reputation but audiences seem to have tired of it: according to market research firm Nielsen, the firm is now sitting at last place in the same daily three-horse race.
The number of people watching CNN’s daytime shows fell from 672,000 to 462,000 last year, meaning it now boasts less than half the 1.146 million viewers of Fox.
At the same time, the channel has lost a raft of established “faces”. Last year, Lou Dobbs left after 27 years (replacement John King duly lost 40 per cent of his audience). Christiane Amanpour ended her 26-year stint in March.
To stop the rot, CNN is changing its furniture. The channel has just made a string of high-profile signings who – on paper, at least – will drag its politically neutral upmarket product closer to the viewer-friendly schlock of its headline-grabbing rivals.
New hires include Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York and (or so it is rumoured) Piers Morgan, the British tabloid editor turned reality show judge.
You might wonder why people should even care about the alleged dumbing-down of a cable TV company and its stars. But CNN is not a normal TV company.
Instead, like a commercial equivalent of the BBC, it is America’s most widely recognised news brand, a worldwide product which has exported star-spangled values and come to represent a sort of journalistic gold standard.
This, after all, is the firm which changed the media landscape when it was founded 30 years ago, by essentially inventing 24-hour rolling TV news. By popularising this concept, and taking it overseas with CNN Worldwide, it revolutionised the way in which the public gets information to a degree that has only since been matched by Google.
In the early days, it brought TV viewers live footage of the Challenger disaster, the Balkan wars and the OJ Simpson car chase. In 1993, its live debate between Al Gore and Ross Perot was watched by 16.3 million people and stood for more than a decade as the highest-rated domestic show in cable TV history.
Today, CNN remains an outfit that does things properly, employing 4000 people in 33 countries (a big deal in a nation whose news agenda is bizarrely inward-looking) and bringing huge corporate muscle to the business of shining a light on hard-to-reach places.
It was the first broadcaster into Haiti after the earthquake and remains the place Americans gravitate towards when major events unfold.
Its problem, though, is that big breaking stories come along relatively rarely. At other times, CNN is forced into a scrappy battle with MSNBC and Fox for a shrinking pie of viewers.
Audiences have migrated online, where they are harder to milk for profits. Some even wonder if, in the internet era, expensive, rolling TV news might have had its day.
“When CNN first came out it was the only game in town,” says Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Centre for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “It invented the idea of news as a utility. It said that just like when when you turn a faucet and water comes out, you can turn on CNN and news comes out. That was a big deal in 1980.” Not any more.
“On a good night, between the three 24-hour news services, you might get 4 million viewers, out of over 300 million people in this country.”
In an effort to draw a regular crowd, CNN’s rivals, Fox and MSNBC, have decided to shoot for loyal followings by employing highly-partisan anchors. It, by contrast, insists on remaining doggedly centrist. As satirist Jon Stewart recently put it, the network would make sure a guest who insisted the Earth was flat would be given equal airtime to someone who argued that it was spherical.
That even-handedness is at odds with a divided political landscape, in which CNN is squeezed between Fox – with its cast of right-leaning pundits such as Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity – and MSNBC, which boasts left-wing equivalents such as Rachel Maddow. Unsurprisingly, its provocative rivals steal the headlines.
“CNN is still a destination news channel for live coverage of unfolding events,” says Rachel Sklar, an occasional CNN contributor and editor-in-large of the website Mediaite. “But in prime time people don’t want news. They want to watch what people say about news.”
Maintaining standards can also make you clunky. Like the BBC, CNN continues to insist that new facts must be double-sourced before being reported.
Speak to senior executives at the network (on the record, at least) and they will claim things have never been better. The firm’s profits enjoyed double-digit growth in the last year, for the sixth time running. It boasts a growing footprint in places such as Africa and the Middle East. Its website is hugely popular. And domestic ratings are an unreliable yardstick of success for an organisation whose global income comes from both subscribers and advertising.
“Honestly, we still walk around here wearing big smiles on our faces,” says Bart Feder, senior vice president of programming. “We have the best news brand on the planet, we are the place good journalists want to go and when things that matter happen in the world, people will still turn to CNN.”
In defence of the somewhat controversial hiring of Spitzer, the former Democratic governor of New York who pursued a “family values” agenda but then resigned after being caught with prostitutes, Feder is anxious to stress that his co-host will be Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker. Their forthcoming new show will not, he says, be an experiment in Fox-style partisanship.
“We are not a channel whose shows have an agenda. We don’t stack the deck like our competitors.”
CNN’s fate may eventually lie in consolidation: rumours have abounded of a tie-in with CBS news, pooling resources to provide programming for both a rolling cable news channel and the network’s nightly news show. But to staff in Atlanta, proudly independent for years, that would be an anathema.
“Thirty years ago we were the ones who revolutionised the news cycle,” laments one employee.
“Now we seem to be the ones falling victim to a different sort of revolution.”
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