continued: Corporatization of the Media: A discussion from News World 2000 conference in Barcelona
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Cramer: It does. First of all I think that the BBC and CNN actually have many similarities--passion about news affairs, passion about the world. But I have more discomfort with the BBC, the pressure always being there about government funding. The pressure always there about the license fee. There was a spring in my step working for CNN and Time Warner because they understand the brand. They understand the brand can be destroyed in a nanosecond. They understand soft journalism, that pulling the punches and getting it wrong can destroy your brand. And if you destroy your brand, whether it is Time Magazine or CNN, you destroy your business.

Hargreaves: What is the worst thing you did for the BBC as a result of these pressures?

Cramer: No specific instance comes to mind; I'm talking about a culture of discomfort. Never did I receive direct instructions to go soft, but there is a discomfort because it concerns the funding mechanism. Very brave, courageous people were there. But there is freshness about working for the company that I work for in America.

Hargreaves: But you're wrong, aren't you, to say as you said to Bob that bigness isn't the problem: it could be too big. There could be too few players, surely you accept that.

Cramer: The issue which we touched on when we started was the issue of homogenous news. It's an issue of whether or not that which comes out of the tap becomes the same. The issue is the sameness of the product, whether we actually see it as a product, whether or not it actually reduces plurality, whether or not it actually cuts down on difference of opinion.

Hargreaves: Do you agree that's a major problem?

Cramer: I can see it is an issue which needs to be addressed.

Hargreaves: How should it be addressed?

Gowing: Can I just interject here and ask if there is any attempt to self-censor? Do you concern yourself as president that some members of your staff know that there are certain limits which is drawn somewhere in the mental sand beyond which they dare not go in journalism?

Cramer: No, because the downside to being an international brand the size of CNN is that you are as good as your last story. You know, the Tailwind documentary debacle of two years ago substantially damaged the CNN brand, and we had to pick ourselves up after that. But that was an issue of lousy journalism, it wasn't an issue of pulling punches, but our brand was damaged.

Hargreaves: But isn't there a danger when you get that kind of damaging incident? It was damaging. Everybody starts trying to be a bit safer. You don't respond to that by saying "let's climb the more difficult mountain here."

Cramer: In the case of CNN there was incredulity that they could have screwed up so badly, and incredulity on the part of the service that they had been there for twenty years and hadn't done so yet. So in their case they set up systems which you could argue should have been in place before. So I think in continuing to climb the mountain they made sure they had the right crampons. They didn't have the right crampons before.

McChesney: If we could return to the point you were making regarding self-censorship, Today all of our main media firms rank among the 100 or 150 largest companies in the world, something that wasn't the case twenty years ago. This is a dramatic change. Suddenly our main news media corporations also are dominant players in the very economy of the world, the political economy they report upon. Their main beneficiaries are things like NAFTA, GATT, the World Trade Organization, which it makes it much easier for them to sell their cases around the world. CNN International is a big beneficiary in that area too. Then you have one of the main causes of our age: global trade and what that means for the environment, for governing, for education, for labor standards, and it has emerged as a huge political issue across our planet. And so we have a interesting situation: the news companies are controlled by corporations that strongly benefit by one side. But the news requires that we have a full hearing from both sides so we can make democratic decisions.

In 1999 we had two extraordinary stories that took place four months apart. In the summer John F. Kennedy Jr. died, and television sets across the world were turned into virtual aquariums. Television news channels were hunting for pieces of the plane, and we received around the clock news coverage like it was the return of the Messiah. Four months later in Seattle we have the American Tiananmen Square, the unprecedented demonstrations against the WTO, with 50,000 people coming out, and the coverage was much less than JFK Jr. Does this reflect the very contradiction that the main companies that should be covering this are conflicted?

Cramer: Now let me pick out one single word from that very long question. You said "control." You're assuming that large companies control their news organizations. No sir.

McChesney: What about what was said before, that they don't cross that line in sand? That you don't even need to walk into the newsroom; by the time it gets there they know what kind of stories not to cover.

Chris Cramer: I'm not sure what analogy you're drawing. Your point I think is that there is some type of corporate agenda. There is no corporate agenda at CNN, no corporate agenda in Time Warner.

McChesney: You had no time for the coverage of the WTO!

Cramer: Well if they didn't I'll take your word for it. Actually I'm not sure what they did on CNN International.

McChesney: The coverage of the WTO in fact almost solely concentrated on the demonstrators at the GAP stores.

Cramer: The assertion that your making is that there is some kind of wiggling of the tiller to ensure that one story gets more than another. That is simply not true. This is a facile suggestion.

Hargreaves: Put the question into the frame of the CNN and BBC comparison. The BBC has just had its first business editor to sort out all these people in the BBC who don't care about shareholders and all that good stuff. CNN is accused of being overattentive to the agenda of the private investor. Isn't it the bottom line that healthy cultures need both of these things, and the American culture of which CNN is essentially a part lacks that dimension in a very significant way?

Cramer: If you're asking, is business good business for us on CNN, the answer is yes. Because our audience tends to watch us to get that. We have a financial news channel. Thirty-five percent of the output on CNN International is business, which is actually not much more than sport. This is all a balancing act having to do with the demographic you're broadcasting to. We are not in our international networks in any way selling the rest of the world short when it comes to our coverage. We spend about 500 million dollars a year on international news coverage. continued

Next page: "Everyone knows where the line is drawn"