For as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve been afraid of a CNN effect. Afraid to write so compellingly about world news that it will make me rich and famous and that every politician will from now on base his or her decisions on my comments.
In 1991, cable network CNN rose to prominence with its coverage of the First Gulf War. The world watched the fighting in Baghdad live with reporter Peter Arnett and America won the battle largely through television. For the media, war became a revenue model.
CNN currently biggest winner in Gulf Warheadlined NRC on January 17, 1991. The article was about the remarkable dominance of a commercial network: public news services proved slower and more irrelevant. But CNN also became a financial winner when providers suddenly included the channel en masse in their basic package. At least, as long as the war lasted.
In the years that followed, a new war or natural disaster sometimes gave the viewing figures a boost and thus justified CNN’s place in the basic package. But big news is rare and people quickly lose interest in disasters, especially in a world full of distractions. So CNN’s numbers naturally declined. Until Donald Trump came to power: CNN and he paid attention to each other and gained from it.
I didn’t come up with all this myself. I quote The New York Timesthat of that boost and those wars in the basic package is exactly the same formulated in 2017. “CNN had a problem, Donald Trump solved it.” It also applied to the Times itself, which saw its subscriber base grow during Trump’s first presidency triple. Just like The Washington Post.
Okay, old news, but networks, channels and newspapers are still concerned about their place in the basic package. Journalist Tony Dokoupil announced his arrival as a presenter by CBS Evening News last week with a journalistic mea culpa: too often the press had missed the story. From now on he finally started listening to the viewers. „I report for you.”
The new news is that old one cable news networks and broadcasting systems have now largely lost their influence to viewers who started broadcasting themselves. To influencers who influence themselves. To bots that join in the conversation. Just as politics today moves outside the international legal order, global communication moves outside the press. And the two are related.
The bond between politics and journalism, which had such an effect during the Gulf War, has been replaced by an extremely volatile relationship between power and opinion. Look at Candace Owens. The influential conservative, who claims that dinosaurs “fake and gay” arejust like the moon landing and the spacehas acquired an astonishing amount of power and influence. Just read along.
The French judge convicted ten influencers this week for falsely claiming that Brigitte Macron, the wife of the French president, was born as a man. The crazy story was made big by, yes, Candace Owens. In the documents surrounding the lawsuit it read that President Macron had asked President Trump to call Owens to order on this point during peace talks on Ukraine. According to Owens herself, her silence was a condition for a peace agreement.
Here the CNN effect has run wild: the war is no longer through professional cable networks, but through completely unpredictable and indomitable opinion makers. Since Candace Owens claims the murder of conservative Charlie Kirk is a inside job of his own organization, the right-wing media have clashed fiercely, say researchers The Washington Post. “There is a feeling that the future of this political movement is at risk.”
In this way, all institutions of democracy are thrown overboard at the same time – and in conjunction. Journalism, science and law. Strangely enough, not everyone in the Netherlands finds this a problem. If America invades Venezuela without a legal basis and kidnaps the president, writes Dilan Yesilgöz of the VVD in a comment on X: “Several truths exist side by side here.” Yes, if you abolish the legal order and principles that we have taken seriously until now, then suddenly a lot of truths coexist.
This is time to stay the course. If you don’t want to put Europe at risk, you will have to recognize the connection between power and opinion. This requires steadfastness in principle from the old institutions, the political parties, the universities and the newspapers. But especially from opinion makers and all those millions of influencers and followers online, who determine the future outside the press.
The journalistic principles of NRC