Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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Television and the Russian revolution

The Times, Wednesday October 6th, 1993

Hazhir Teimourian is gripped by the live pictures from Moscow but has doubts about the unrivalled coverage

By 8am last Monday, when some of Boris Yeltsin's tanks' were already firing on the rebel parliamentar­ians in the Russian White House, I knew that I would probably not watch any other television coverage of the drama than the continuous, live pictures provided by America's Cable News Network (CNN), until the fate of the struggle was settled. Any signs of hesitation on the part of the tank crews could have split the Russian army and plunged that huge country into another civil war that would shape all our lives for years to come. And if the split did come, I had to know immediately.

This was, of course, simply a personal reaction. I had no profes­sional part to play in determining the course of the event itself, unlike the world's most powerful man, Bill Clinton, who has had CNN installed in all his lavatories, or the foreign ministers of Europe who were also watching the same channel as I was, but in Brussels, before going into conference to decide their policy on the new Russia. One of those ministers, Douglas Hurd, refuses to stay at any hotel that does not provide him with CNN in his bedroom.

At 9am, I decided to see whether Sky News or BBC Breakfast News had gone over to live coverage. Had they done so, I would have stayed with them out of loyalty. But alas, they had not. Instead, they were broadcasting packaged reports that were already out of date by the time they were aired. (For example; they both led on a rumour that a white flag had been seen fluttering out of a window in the parliament build­ing. In fact, half an hour earlier, CNN's cameras had investigated all sides of the White House for such a flag and not found one.) They also devoted chunks of their time to the explosion of a number of small bombs in north London, as well as other stories.

The same was roughly true of the BBC's World Service Television (WS1), which is not available in this country unless you have a five- metre satellite dish; It had some live reports from Moscow during its news bulletins, but otherwise suffered from Television Cen­tre's decision not to give top priority to a possible showdown in the Russian capital.

By contrast, whereas CNN had had only one reporter, Claire Shipman, in Moscow last Wednes­day, she had been joined by five other reporters and 24 technical crew a day later. They had installed cameras all round the White House, and two local channels carried their pictures with Russian commentary.

To be fair, the other broadcasters have decided that they are not in the business of catering to the needs of news addicts or foreign minis­ters. They pursue other audiences, which makes them more interest­ing when little of great importance is happening in the world.

But could their policies of not chasing the most influential (and the wealthiest) audience be a coun­sel of despair? Has CNN's monopo­ly reached such a stage that no one else would have any hope of becoming a viable competitor for many years? At times, it would seem so.

When, for example, American sen­ators complain that CNN is given access to more secret information by their government than they are,or when, as during the build-up to the Gulf war with Iraq, the State Department invited CNN to film the capabilities of America's newest fighter aircraft to send a diplomatic message to a foreign state, it will require almost a cultural change in world leaders to take any other broadcaster seriously.

Such an attitude would then reflect itself in poorer reporting by such rivals. It is quite possible, for instance, that CNN's greater pre­paredness for the drama in Mos­cow this week was the result of prior briefing by either of the protagonists. During the Gulf war, the Iraqi, government regularly gave CNN two hours' notice before some events, so that Atlanta could change its schedules to carry them live.Yet such awesome power, which recalls an earlier time when the Tsar of Russia would not decide on military tactics against England until he had read  The Times, is dangerous if unri­valled. The sympathetic reporting by CNN in Baghdad threatened to create an effective anti-war move­ment in the West. Had it done so, by now the dictator of Iraq would have been one of the most powerful men on the globe, the political, if not the military, boss of the Arab world, and probably in possession of nuclear bombs for his next conquest.

There are reports that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is keen to set up a rival network based in London, and it is to be hoped that the BBC's WST will one day be rich enough to drop its normal programming to give continuous coverage to great emergencies. Until such times, I shall watch CNN with fingers crossed.

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