behind the news

CNN: Amnesia at Age 25

June 3, 2005

CNN turned 25 this month, and over the past week it has been throwing itself a party. Part of the celebration included a list of the top 25 defining moments of the cable network’s life, from the Challenger explosion to the recent tsunami.

Tucked away in this list, in between the 2000 Florida recount and the Gulf Wars (the first of which was inarguably CNN’s shining moment) are the “Genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia.”

It’s no shocker that coverage of the current and ongoing carnage in Sudan wasn’t included alongside Rwanda and Bosnia. But, since this list includes events as recent as last Christmas, it’s worth considering why it wasn’t.

The answer can be found by looking back at the CNN of 1994 — the one that covered the Rwandan genocide.

There have been critics of that coverage, and we’ll cite some, but there is no doubt at all that, whatever its shortcomings, the CNN of 1994 brought the genocide into the homes of millions of Americans. True, CNN, like most everybody else, paid little attention to the underlying tensions that erupted into full-scale war upon the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu leader President Habyarimanal, so its performance can only be measured in the stories it told, how often it told them, and from where they were told after the violence began.

A quick refresher: Between April 1994 and July 1994, nearly one million Tutsis perished as the result of an ethnic cleansing campaign by Hutus that transpired at a rate three times that of the Nazi killings during World War II. Beginning in April 1994, CNN received live reports from correspondent Gary Streiker as he made his way to Rwanda via Kenya, Burundi and Tanzania. At first, Streiker focused on the American angle — foreign nationals fleeing the violence heading out of Rwanda as he, Streiker, headed into it.

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After the initial exodus, it would be nearly a month before Streiker would appear again, although CNN did update viewers several times per week as events unfolded. Steven Livingston, a professor at George Washington University who studied coverage of the Rwanda genocide, offered this critical assessment: “For American television, Rwanda wasn’t a story of genocide, Rwanda was a medical story. The lion’s share of coverage comes in July-August, not April, May. What’s [the story in] July-August, the refugee camps in Zaire. … That’s even more true of the presumably omnipotent CNN.” It’s true — the coverage did increase only well after the majority of the killings, and, as Livingston said, at that point the story was portrayed as a “medical” one.

But this assessment ignores the impact of Streiker’s earlier presence in Rwanda, where his camera crew was able to capture the horror of the genocide and beam it into living rooms across America. During a May 9, 1994 broadcast, the late CNN correspondent John Holliman emphasized the significance of the images: “As I read and watched the news coming from Haiti and Rwanda this week, I was struck not by individuals who made a difference in the countries, but by a haunting picture. CNN’s Gary Strieker used it in his report from Rwanda’s border with Tanzania. The rapidly moving water of the [Kagera] River, carrying with it hundreds of Rwandan bodies, slaughtered and dumped in the river, creating a picture not seen since the Nazi death camps of the 1940s. An image of almost unimaginable horror. Will the world react to these pictures and do anything?”

On many occasions between April and July, CNN warned its viewers that a “report contains pictures which may disturb some of our viewers” and then rolled footage from the war zone, making it impossible for Americans to ignore what was happening. When 20,000 Tutsis were massacred in a church in early June 1994, Streiker brought the story home and CNN rolled the footage, or, as Streiker put it, pictures that “only begin to describe the carnage.”

As Livingston observed, later in the summer the story became one of refugees in need of medical help. In this vein, Christine Amanpour joined the scene on June 26 and filed reports for the network — many from a refugee camp in Goma, Zaire — about victims, aid workers, and late-arriving international response.

While it might not have been perfect, CNN’s performance in 1994, in particular the use of images, far exceeds its skimpy coverage of the current conflict in Sudan. Simply put, if you watched CNN in the summer of 1994, you were made aware of a genocide taking place on a nationwide scale — and you were given a working understanding of what triggered it.

The same cannot be said for the network’s coverage of Sudan this year. These days there’s a lot of talk from anchors and guests about the pictures they see, but the network doesn’t actually have any footage. By CJR Daily’s count, the last time CNN showed pictures from Sudan was March 15. At the time, Wolf Blitzer told viewers, “The images in the piece we’re about to show you may be disturbing to some viewers.” Disturbing? Yes, but necessary to get across the fact that brutal slaughter occurs on a daily basis in Sudan.

In CNN’s defense, access to the war zone is off-limits to most reporters. New York Times columnist and genocide hawk Nicholas Kristof described the situation earlier this week: “The world might also respond if people could see what is going on, but Sudan has barred most reporters from the area. I’m here because I accompanied Kofi Annan on a visit — bless him for coming! — and then jumped ship while here.” Similarly, when CJR Daily interviewed the Washington Post‘s Emily Wax in February, she told stories of waiting around for weeks for travel permits that were often rejected.

But that’s no excuse for the fact that the Sudan genocide barely registers as a news topic on CNN. Over the past two weeks there have been four brief reports on Sudan, in regards to Darfur, mostly tied to Annan’s visit this past weekend. (By comparison, CNN has updated viewers on the saga of “runaway bride” Jennifer Willbanks more than 20 times in the last three days — and that “story” peaked weeks ago.)

Now, 11 years after Rwanda, it is blogs, not broadcast or cable reporters, that report on fresh attacks in Sudan. Wednesday, Mark Leon Goldberg of The American Prospect reported on an attack by “four Sudanese military helicopter gunships” in Northern Darfur on May 27. Goldberg felt his story deserved a larger platform, writing, “It’s somewhat bizarre to be breaking news about an attack in Darfur on a blog, but as this is the most immediate forum at my disposal, here we go.” As Goldberg pointed out, there was more to the story than just another attack by the Sudanese military. Just last week Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick reassured reporters that the Sudanese government has “stood down the helicopters and the gunships” and the aircraft are “not moving off the airfields.”

Something is amiss here. Where is CNN on this story?

Apparently, it’s still tied to the played-out tail-end of the sorry saga of the hapless Ms. Willbanks. Maybe it’s time to change that preoccupation. Earlier this week, the International Crisis Group and Zogby International released a survey on public awareness of the situation in Sudan. While 64 percent of likely voters said they were “aware” of the crisis in Sudan, only 18 percent said that they were “very aware.” Yet “84 percent of respondents said the U.S. should not tolerate an extremist government committing such attacks [as are occurring in Darfur] and should use its military assets, short of inserting U.S. combat troops on the ground to protect civilians, to help bring them to a halt.”

That suggests that the degree to which Americans are unconcerned about the unfolding atrocities is a direct function of the degree to which they are uninformed about them. Take a look at the CNN programming lineup from around the time of the Rwanda coverage. At least two full hours of programming per day were dedicated to world or international coverage with shows like “The International Hour” and “The World Today.” Those shows are no longer on the air, and CNN’s current schedule does not have a single weekday program focused exclusively on world news coverage.

In March, the Times‘ Kristof spoke to me about the phenomenon of declining international coverage by media in general: “Part of that is the degree to which network news coverage has been scaled back. A dozen years ago there would have been a camera crew for the networks in Cairo, sitting around desperate for a story, and when Darfur happened they would have gone down and forced it down our throats. And it would have been in our living rooms everyday. But the combination of [personnel] cutbacks and Iraq meant that that just didn’t happen.”

In its list of the 25 defining moments in its own history, CNN includes this quote from Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the heartbroken commander of the small U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda at the time of the slaughter: “The genocide was brutal, criminal and disgusting and continued for 100 days under the eyes of the international community.” Earlier this February at an event promoting his last book, Dallaire reported that CNN had spoken to him as part of a package it was doing for its 25th birthday celebration. Dallaire said, “I told CNN, ‘There is absolutely no excuse, with that enormous capability, that while you are showing the incredible suffering of the Indonesians, your over-coverage was done at the expense of Darfur, done at the expense of the Congo, done at the expense of Burundi, where other human beings are experiencing on-going traumas that are still causing enormous casualties. But they don’t make the radar screen anymore.'”

It’s no surprise that such comments were not heralded by the CNN that is celebrating its own 25 defining moments.

Last July, former CNN White House correspondent John King offered a bit of on-air commentary about balancing Iraq and Sudan coverage. “It’s the practice of ‘Newsnight’ every night to pay respects to Americans who have died in Iraq,” he said. “The day when there are no more casualties to report can’t come soon enough. If we applied that practice [paying respects] to civilians killed in the civil wars in Sudan, it would take up the entire broadcast, every night, for weeks.”

But is the only alternative to ignore the situation altogether?

The truth is, when the press falls silent, it does more than just leave the rest of us in the dark; it also allows governments to fall silent. Until a passing reference at a press conference yesterday, it had been nearly 145 days — five months — since President Bush even made reference to the ongoing genocide, nearly 145 days during which the administration stayed clear of any engagement with the situation.

The second truth is, lack of access is not an excuse for a lack of coverage. Covering Darfur requires resources and dedication. The pictures CNN aired on March 15 were gathered by a former U.S. Marine who had recently returned from Darfur, demonstrating that where there’s a will, there’s a way, and that there are witnesses ready to be pressed into service. Some of them are even reporters, currently diverted to more airy and less somber assignments.

CNN just needs to find its way, so it can help those reporters get on theirs.

Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.