The Last Resort At Your Holiday Resort (CNN)

Member Name: stoffy

Product:	CNN
Date:	10/06/03 (159 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: the only thing in English in many European resorts

Disadvantages: too frothy to be a proper information service..., but too disjointed to be a good at-a-glance guide to the news

(NB. The following is on CNN's International TV Channel rather than the traditional American CNN...)

It’s when I’m on holiday that I realise that I am a bit of a news junkie. Away from internet access and my beloved Ceefax, it becomes harder to find out what’s happening in the world. Whilst there are always an abundance of the British tabloids in every holiday resort from Lesbos to Lanzarote, it’s hard to find any sort of proper newsworthy story out of, say, ‘The Sun’, let alone coping with the fact that you have to pay three times the cover price that it is in Blighty.

Therefore, I’m reliant on TV... as any package holiday-er will testify, getting a reliable news channel can be a bit tricky on unpredictable foreign satellite TV, where there is an omnipresence of moody Spanish women sitting on stools fielding calls from viewers trying to get their mitts on a Playstation, German variety shows that veer from bizarre to perturbing and Eurosport with a multi-lingual commentary that will have you reaching for your dictionary quicker than you can say ‘Esperanto’.

On my recent jaunt to Gran Canaria, the only English language channel available apart from sporadic periods of English tennis commentary on Eurosport, was CNN (Cable News Network). Based in Atlanta, Georgia, CNN was the prototype 24-hour news channel, and now broadcasts a special International service around the world.

Its format is a mixture of rolling news delivered by the studio anchors to news items from roving reporters, as well as special features on the arts, weather, culture and business. Ticker-tape (the band at the bottom of the screen where you can see brief headlines scroll) is a permanent feature of CNN.

There is a wild inconsistency in the gravity of news that is featured, with many of the day’s big stories being ignored whilst obscure and trivial items are given precedence. Last year,
during the India / Pakistan nuclear stand-off, more time was devoted to discussing odourous Indonesian tropical fruit and the aggravation of having to remember a computer password than the impending global crisis. Whilst diversity is always healthy, it did seem a little inflexible that priorities couldn’t be readjusted.

Despite its supposedly international manifesto, there is still very much a US-centred bias to the news, whether directly, or via incessant coverage of the Israel and the Middle-East and its impact on the USA. Whilst perhaps understandable due to recent events, a serious event in South America or South-East Asia will be given barely a couple of words on the ticker-tape, whilst a new book by Hilary Clinton will be worthy of a five-man panel discussion. The sports coverage also devotes a disproportionate amount of time to US Football and the US Baseball League as well.

On all occasions that I was viewing, the presentation religiously stuck to the one man / one woman Anglo-American team behind a desk model. Like BBC Breakfast News, GMTV and Sky News, it seems as though CNN’s ethos is to inform the public about the death, destruction and deflation via attempting to squeeze out every last drop of ‘sexual chemistry’ that may exist between presenters. This now looks very jaded, and surely something a bit more radical is in order on rolling news channels.

Most of the CNN presenters are the ‘yang’ to the ‘yins’ of high-flying British terrestrial anchors like Kirsty Young and Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Terry Baddoo, once John Craven’s stand in on ‘Newsround’, is relegated to a blink-and-you’ll-miss it sports round up, whilst Daljit Dhaliwal was surely destined for greater things than being the perfect-hair accompaniment to Jim Clancy.

Interestingly for a supposed information world-leader, the whole presentation is unprofessional and disjointed. By port
raying the news in brief sound-bites as well as dedicating time to featurettes containing sub-Channel 5 trivia, it falls between two stools with a heavy thud. Too frothy to be considered informative and too inconsistent to be efficient at giving news at a glance, there are so many areas that it needs to improve on before it becomes anything other than a last resort in your holiday resort.

Summary: