‘People don’t want a war unless you absolutely have to have one, but the media would not present the possibility that there were alternatives — so therefore we went to war very much in the manner of a totalitarian society.”
That’s Noam Chomsky, responding to questions about the media’s role in the first Gulf War. He’s referring to the lack of coverage on Iraq’s serious and negotiable proposals for withdrawal from Kuwait, which, he says, made life a lot easier for United States diplomats when George Bush Snr invaded.
In setting up the polemic for an interview with Chris Cramer, MD of CNN International, Chomsky may very well be the “too obvious” option. As The Guardian has it: “Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible as one of the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities.” But here the citation could be forgiven. The first Gulf War, as everybody knows, put CNN on the map.
It’s a point that Cramer, in Johannesburg for the CNN African Journalist of the Year ceremony, readily admits. “There’s a perception that CNN made its mark during Gulf War I. That’s true. I don’t particularly care for the phrase ‘we had an extremely good war’, although in a sense we did.”
Cramer’s credentials augment his stated aversion to his own phrase. In 1980 he was one of the hostages in the infamous siege of the Iranian embassy in London — his book Hostage is a first-hand account of the ordeal — and he is now part of a lobby group taking the Pentagon to task over the killing of journalists by so-called friendly fire during the second Gulf War. He is also honorary president of the International News Safety Institute, a new global organisation that works to protect journalists in war zones.
“Journalists are now targets,” says Cramer, with specific reference to media fatalities sustained in covering US President George W Bush’s Iraqi campaign. “There are those who don’t want us around, who want us removed. We are irritants at best and enemies at worst.”
Whether that heightens the irony of CNN achieving profitability during Bush Snr’s Iraqi campaign is a question best left to Chomsky. Either way, the channel hasn’t looked back since old man Bush rolled his tanks over the Kuwaiti border in 1991.
“CNN was launched in 1985, but we became profitable at the time of Gulf War I,” Cramer confirms. “In 1991 the CNN newsgroup was a monopoly. Now we’re not. Today there isn’t a pan- regional news channel making a profit, apart from CNN. This is a very tough business, a very expensive business.”
Although Turner Broadcasting (the division of parent company Time Warner into which CNN falls) doesn’t split out profits for the individual brands, a representative of CNN in London has been able to confirm the latest annual revenues for the news network. They come in “at about $1-billion for the entire CNN news group, 25% of which is accounted for by CNN International.”
According to Cramer, revenue on CNN International is broken down into conventional advertising, sponsorship of “soft” feature programmes, subscription through cable operations, and broadcast sales to carrier satellite television providers. But the quality of the audience is the kicker on these numbers.
“We’re not mass media,” says Cramer. “The audience we target successfully is the affluent top 5%, the middle to senior managers that travel at the sharp end of the aircraft. They’re absolutely not American. We may have been a cosy support system for US expatriates at one time, now Americans account for only 2% of our audience. Seventy-five to 80% speak English as a second language.”
South Africa is not simply another of these non-American target markets. Cramer explains: “My experience of South Africa is that many in the country aspire to global citizenship. There is an insatiable appetite for information in this country. I didn’t set out to strip the ranks of e.tv or SABC, but you have some really good journalistic talent.”
We also have some really incredulous journalistic talent. Local columnists and cartoonists had a field day with “embedded journalism”, the term used to describe the placement of network journalists with US and British troops during the Iraq War.
Cramer himself is far from sold on the method. “I was sceptical about embedding last year. It hasn’t worked incredibly well, but it has produced some remarkable coverage. Because of it we had to run a tape delay for the first time ever, as we were concerned about what would come out live. Do I think it’s a blueprint for the future? I doubt it. It wasn’t the only way we covered the conflict.”
One perception strengthened by embedding is that networks such as CNN applaud the Bush administration and US foreign policy. During the recent coverage of the Ronald Reagan state funeral, CNN offered little or no criticism of Reagan’s policies.
Says Cramer: “I don’t make apologies for the way we covered the funeral of a former state politician who had a significant effect on US and world policies. It was an incredible event. We don’t have state funerals in the US. The last one was John F Kennedy. As for there being no criticism of Reagan on CNN, that’s a little unfair. People tend to pull punches on the day they bury someone.”
Is CNN International a global mouthpiece for US foreign policy?
“I have a motto I keep in my office,” Cramer responds coolly. “It says, ‘when feelings run deep, impartiality might seem like bias’. The notion that CNN has a viewpoint, or is soft on Bush, or that it is cheering for US foreign policy, simply isn’t true. We don’t have a viewpoint or an agenda.
“Remember, 9/11 was this generation’s Pearl Harbour. You could only appreciate that if you were in the US at the time, as I was. There is a war on terrorism in the US. At the same time, the events in Iraq last year were violently opposed by other parts of the world. CNN International’s job was to portray that, and we did.
“There is hardly a textbook for this stuff. Because CNN happens to be owned by a US company and is headquartered in Atlanta means we must have a view? I totally reject that.”
So the real question, perhaps, should address the stories that don’t get shown.
Chomsky again: “The decision to use violence is always a very serious one. In a functioning democratic society that decision would only be taken after a lot of public discussion of the issues… Well, that never happened in the case of the [first] Gulf War — and it was the fault of the American media that it never happened.”
The question still remains: how many alternatives did US media present to the second Gulf War?
Kevin Bloom is the editor of The Media magazine