CNN is Back — Perhaps

RISHON LEZION, Israel — I have never liked tele­vi­sion  news. It is super­fi­cial, prone to sen­sa­tion­al­ism, and inher­ently focused on enter­tain­ment rather than infor­ma­tion. (The fail­ure of the broad­cast net­works to cover the tur­moil in Iran has only inten­si­fied my feel­ings. See here and here.)

How­ever, I was happy to see today that CNN is back on the Israeli cable provider HOT on chan­nel 74. (I don’t know about YES, the country’s satel­lite net­work.) If I want to see an Amer­i­can news net­work, CNN is less bad than Fox News. Still, although I receive most of my daily news online, I usu­ally watch the BBC or Sky News in Eng­lish when a major news story breaks.

But I must remain crit­i­cal of CNN, which was the best news net­work until it dumbed itself down to com­pete with Fox News. (This is one exam­ple of why the free mar­ket, usu­ally the best eco­nomic sys­tem, is not always the best for soci­ety. But I digress.)

As a for­mer jour­nal­ist, I know that real reporters are self-sacrificing ide­al­ists who do not mind — and usu­ally love — going around offi­cial author­i­ties, espe­cially when they are dic­ta­to­r­ial tyrants. Under­cover reporters have recently filed reports on life in North Korea, and CNN itself once had a reporter — Chris­t­ian Aman­pour, I believe — go under­cover in Afghanistan to doc­u­ment life under the Tal­iban there.

Iran has banned for­eign reporters from leav­ing their offices, or the gov­ern­ment has kicked them out entirely. CNN’s anchors have been air­ing ama­teur reports and videos while essen­tially sur­ren­der­ing by stat­ing that they can­not pro­vide cur­rent cov­er­age them­selves. A reporter just said on the air that “we can­not report from the ground.”

Hog­wash. A real news orga­ni­za­tion would do what­ever it takes to get to the story. Hire Ira­ni­ans as free­lancers and get them hid­den cam­eras and micro­phones. Get jour­nal­ists who speak Farsi and do not look like West­ern­ers inside the protests. There is always a way. Robert Fisk, cor­re­spon­dent for the Inde­pen­dent news­pa­per in Eng­land, is defy­ing the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment by fil­ing reports like this.

Stop being use­less if you want to have any sem­blance of a rep­u­ta­tion left after the tur­moil in Iran. Stop air­ing soft-news crap when there is real news occur­ing in one of the most impor­tant parts of the world.

Update: CNN is air­ing a pro­mo­tional report on Larry King host­ing a behind-the-scenes report on the Jonas Broth­ers. The freakin’ Jonas Broth­ers. Mean­while, Iran is threat­en­ing to exe­cute the lead­ers of the pro­test­ers, and the Guardian Coun­cil may be meet­ing to dis­cuss the fate of supreme leader Aya­tol­lah Khameni. A new, mas­sive rally has started in Tehran. But… the Jonas Broth­ers!