Then in the mid-90s CNN and Time Warner merged. The issue of Time Warner’s share price became fairly central to management. Thus, CNN’s bottom line became much more central, and the efficiency … of the news gathering operation was also suddenly more important. [This] meant that if you couldn’t justify high ratings with a story, increasingly, they didn’t want to spend money on it. Of course, it’s hard to know in advance sometimes. And sometimes there are stories that are just damn important and your coverage decision should not be determined by ratings, if you consider your organization to be doing something other than just making money. If you do believe as a news organization you are part of a public trust and you’re trying to serve democracy and citizens of a democracy with the information they need in order to judge their country’s policies … then making newsgathering decisions about international stories based entirely on ratings is extremely irresponsible.

Then there was the AOL-Time Warner merger. It’s been made very clear by [CEO] Dick Parsons and other people at the top of what is now called Time Warner again that CNN is a product like any other product in the Time Warner family of products, be it MAD Magazine or whatever movie studio. It might as well be toothpaste. The idea was profit maximization. Within that, there was less and less room for the kind of journalism that says, we need to inform the citizens of our country with things that are just necessary for them to know, even if that means that on a particular night the ratings on Fox might be a little higher.

As a result, when I interviewed the Prime Minister of Japan not a sound bite of it aired in the United States, even though he was talking about Iraq the entire time — even though he was talking about his decision to support President Bush by sending troops to Iraq, which was the first time since World War II they were sending troops into harm’s way with tremendous implications politically in Japan. That story was deemed to be of no interest to American viewers.

TL: So as bureau chief you just found yourself advancing stories that got no play?

RM: The story got play on CNN International … but there was just increasingly this frustration that there was an assumption Americans didn’t want to know anything about most of the rest of the world, that it was just too complicated for them. …

Let me just explain how the process works.

So I interview [Junichiro] Koizumi, the prime minister of Japan. Obviously I knew about this interview in advance — it doesn’t just happen. So the shows know about it. That means that the producers of the prime time shows in the United States are alerted to when it’s going to be completed and fed into Atlanta, and the shows on CNN International are all alerted also. Of course, they are not going to make final decisions about anything until they find out what he said. [It also depends] on what else happened that day. But it’s up to the producers of every individual show to decide what runs on the show. The producer’s job depends on their show having high ratings. If their show declines in ratings, after … a certain amount time, then they get replaced. Their entire incentive is short-term, night-to-night ratings.

As it was put to me, you’re fighting with Fox for every fifteen seconds of airtime. You’re trying to put on whatever is the most titillating, gripping stuff to keep people from changing the channel. What that means is that if there is something that one thinks the American public needs to know, but it is not as sexy as Michael Jackson, then they’ll go with Michael Jackson.

So what happened on that day was that there was a lot of news. In fact, there was a Michael Jackson trial development that day. There was a development with Jessica Lynch. Colin Powell came out and talked to CNN. So they didn’t have room for the Prime Minister of Japan because they considered all these other things to be of higher priority.

TL: Why do you think CNN International is different? I recently reviewed it for CJR Daily, and it’s a far more sophisticated show.

RM: They’re going to a global audience. And they’re treating their audience as an intelligent audience that wants to be informed about world affairs. They’re not treating the American audience that way … because the Nielson ratings are telling them that the American audience wants to be entertained. … As you say, why isn’t a show like “Your World Today” on CNN USA all the time? Because decisions have been made for a long time that that kind of thing isn’t of interest to Americans.

TL: It’s something of an endless cycle, because if you continue to feed out pointless news, then no one is going to be educated enough on a serious subject to appreciate the stories that do air.

RM: Yeah, exactly. It’s completely self-fulfilling — the self-fulfilling vicious cycle.

TL: Finally, on your personal blog you call yourself a “recovering TV reporter.” What do you mean by that?

RM: [In one way], it’s a joke. I dated a recovering alcoholic once and so I just thought it was kind of funny to call myself a “recovering TV reporter.” Slightly more seriously, there are habits you have to unlearn when you come out of the very formulaic world of reporting that I was in at CNN … just in terms of being honest with your viewers, not talking down to them, having a conversation with your audience, being more transparent … allowing your personality to appear publicly. But also just being able to do what I want, as opposed to what my editor wanted, which was to cover my region more like a tourist, rather than a journalist.