When Ted Turner founded the Cable News Network back in 1980, CNN was just a bunch of journalists and a lot of enthusiasm. Then CNN started broadcasting 24/7 and started being a professional reliable serious network and in 1991 it reached its peak of popularity when Peter Arnett was the only Western Correspondent broadcasting global news from a building's roof in downtown Baghdad under the coalition bombing. Since the Kuwait's invasion and the Desert Storm operation, CNN became The News Network and took over the whole news market.
If someone entered in a coma in 1991 and woke up today, probably he/she wouldn't be able to recognize CNN as the same network that did that fearless frontier journalism. Today CNN is an erratic media, without any certain destination. If you look at CNN website for example you see hundreds of banners with the same repeated name in every of its pages: Amanpour. Christiane Amanpour seems to have taken over the network with her Marie Antoinette attitude. In fact the name Amanpour is shown as a brand together with the one of CNN that seems instead to have lost most of its shine.
In the end who is Christiane Amanpour?
Why she's considered as the news goddess?
What she's really done to be considered as the news reliability symbol?
When I went to Kosovo back in 1998, I spoke to an english cameraman and a news producer who worked closely to her when she covered Bosnia for CNN back in the 90's. What they told me is they saw her dealing with officers of the 7th Muslim Brigade who agreed to detonate explosive shells when she was doing her live report to give more realism to her coverage of the conflict.
Then there's the famous story of the Sarajevo's Markale Marketplace when she eventually went on the air tosay that the Serbs had probably done it. Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times testified that Amanpour "was sitting in Belgrade when that marketplace massacre happened, and there was no way she could have known that".
When on February 11, Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation I tuned on CNN and I saw Christiane Amanpour talking to Joseph Flynn, a former Ambassador to the Vatican, during the interview Amanpour defined Flynn as a man “who met the pope twice”. Indeed the man talked about the Pope with a lot of self-confidence to comply to Amanpour's given trust. The former diplomat could not help enough Amanpour with a straight explanation but he then acquired a lotof self confidence and went much far by claiming "he was not surprised" by the Pope’s resignation, while even Cardinal Dolan (who for sure knows the Pope better than Mr. Flynn) admitted to having been caught by a great surprise once he learned of the Pope's resignation. On that same day on CNN website's home page Mr.Flynn who admitted of having met Pope Bendict twice, he eventually became "a friend of the pope", the story is still On-line so you can check it yourself.
That's when I started thinking that CNN has really changed since the time I was working there back in 1996. Indeed it’s really hard to consider it still a reliable news network because for both reporters and guests, (especially when Amanpour is involved), ego always comes first. While back in the 90's the motto was "news comes first". At least I think it was so. This is more less who Christiane Amanpour is, an egomaniac whose only news she care of is Christiane Amanpour herself, a pure narcissistic personality, a pathological attention-seeker like thousand of sick people in her same position, (think to Ann Coulter for example)Since I was a kid I have been asking myself what's the purpose for egocentricity?, what's its ultimate goal?
Once you are able to center the world's attention on yourself what's your ultimate final accomplishment/meaning? You feel better? I don't think so, especially if there's no point in focusing the attention on yourself, if this is totally unjustified. Being a totally pointless action, I think only a state of mental illness should lead someone to center the world's attention on him/herself. Without risking of discriminating anyone, this is mostly a women's thing, there are not many male newsmen who suffer of such a state of illness, except maybe Fox News Anchor Bill O' Reilly but there are a lot of rumors about his homosexuality so you can't include O'Reilly into the men's category.
Regarding CNN, I warmly invite you to check out travel.cnn.com where you can find really some great journalistic pearls. I think the article listed in the travel section are part of a foreign policy scheme, because they are completely ridiculous meaningless dumb stories. The first is by someone called Barry Neild, (not sure if it's a fake name)and the title of this jewel is "The World coolest nationalities: Where do you rank?" According to this encephalitic "journalist", the world's coolest nationalities are Americans and Singaporean. I don't know what this retard took as his parameter, but the funny thing is this is one of CNN main attraction on their travel section, and the worst aspect of it is the fact that it's a permanent section!!!! Indeed this fabulous piece of journalism is On-line since January 2011!! That means 2 years. That's why being the lamest piece of s***t I ever read there's for sure a national security issue involved here or some serial killer is asking for this piece to be up On-line until he says "ok now drop it!".
Can you imagine if the New York Times makes the world's coolest nationalities in his travel section? That can lead to world war III!!!. I mean from such dumb stories you can tell CNN is not like the Titanic, but it started digging the seafloor!!!! Another news jewel always in the travel section of CNN it's "World 10 most loved cities", ahahah you have to see this, it's hilarious! it's probably the same serial killer who wants this poetaster whose name is Jordan Rana (obviously a fake name as everybody knows the word "rana" in Italian means frog).CNN allowed this guy to publish another great ranking, one of those things that really can destroy diplomatic relationship among countries "World's most hated cities" and Jordan the slick put Paris as number 3.On the world's most loved cities, the frog did not put a single Italian town. Just as to say here at CNN we hate Italy. Why? My idea is probably the fact that not many CNN advertising investors come from Italy. That's why they did these stupid ranking. Then if you decide to buy CNN advertising you go up in the rank. This could be named for the genius marketing award 2013.I really don't know what's going on within CNN, I am not sure what their problems are but I hope they will be able to solve them soon, otherwise it won't pass much till CNN will completely disappear.
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