CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, has accused the news channel of dumbing down by devoting too much airtime to what he termed ”pervert of the day” at the expense of serious news.
Turner told staff at a celebration of CNN’s 25th anniversary that he had tried to create a channel that would eschew the ”trivial news” liked by local stations in favour of international coverage.
”I would like to see us return to a little more international coverage on the domestic feed and a little more environmental coverage and, maybe, a little less of the pervert of the day,” he told staff in Atlanta.
”We have a lot of perverts on today and I know that, but is that really news? You’ve got to cover Michael Jackson but not three stories about perversion that we do every day as well.”
Turner, who no longer has links with the channel, said there was a need for a ”serious news person” on American TV, adding: ”Somebody’s got to be the most respected name in television news and I wanted that position for CNN.
”I wanted to be the New York Times of the airwaves — not the New York Post.”
However, Turner admitted that the channel, which has lost out in recent years to Rupert Murdoch’s populist rightwing Fox News, did cover celebrity stories in his day.
”We followed OJ Simpson around LA a lot and we had Jessica in the well. It was pretty trivial but high interest,” he said in a reference to the 1987 rescue of an 18-month-old baby from a well.
CNN pioneered 24-hour news and made its name in the first Gulf war when its reporters stayed in Baghdad. But financial pressures forced him to sell CNN to Time Warner. – Guardian Unlimited Â