‘There’s A Lot of Smells Right Now’: CNN Shacks Up With Qatar, And Guess What Happened Next

As the saying goes: History repeats itself — first as tragedy, second as farce. Qatar managed to exert massive influence over Academia, with tragic consequences in the wake of Hamas’ atrocities in the October 7 massacres. Now it has taken aim at another American institution — the Protection Racket Media — and the result is not so much farce as it is cringe.

In February, CNN announced an expansion to Qatar, with facilities provided by the Qataris, the Free Beacon recalled last night.  At the time, CNN declared that having access to Media City Qatar, the regime’s creation that “fosters innovation and collaboration in Qatar’s vibrant media landscape,” would give the cable news channel the platform for important stories from the center of a troubled region:

In addition, this expansion provides CNN with additional resource in the Gulf and Middle East at a time when the region is central to the global news agenda – from coverage of geo-politics and breaking news through to stories on business, technology, sport, culture and travel. CNN will also provide training in journalism and production to students and young professionals in Qatar.

“CNN has a deep commitment to editorial coverage of the Middle East,” said Mike McCarthy, Executive Vice President & Managing Editor of CNN Worldwide. “Whether by adding to our ability to report from the region, providing new, cutting-edge studio facilities, or allowing us to tell a wider range of stories from here in new ways, including via a brand new weekly show, this new operation in Qatar both underscores and expands that commitment.”

Er … maybe “collaboration” is the wrong word to use here. Two decades ago, CNN “collaborated” with the “vibrant media landscape” in Baghdad, where then-news chief Eason Jordan “collaborated” for a decade in quashing news of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities.That included the torture of a CNN employee, Jordan later admitted, as well as the murder and dismemberment of a CNN source, all overlooked in order to keep “collaborating” in Saddam’s “vibrant media landscape.” (I wrote about this extensively at Captain’s Quarters.) 

That was an unconscionable tragedy, not to mention despicable cowardice and an affront to the claim that CNN covered the news honestly. This time around, as the Free Beacon noted last night, looks more like “cringe” than farce. What kind of groundbreaking news coverage will CNN provide its viewers from Doha’s Media City Qatar?

While CNN’s vice president for communications Jonathan Hawkins told the Washington Free Beacon at the time that Qatar would be footing the bill for “facilities and technical support,” the network said the beating heart of the operation would be an editorially independent “innovative weekly show” from a “team of CNN content creators” aired on CNN International.

Meet CNN Creators, the completely, totally, absolutely not sponsored in any way new show from a “team of digital-native storytellers as they navigate the stories that matter most.” The first episode features four little-known CNN reporters and producers gallivanting through Doha’s Souq Waqif market, where they marvel at stray cats and try on “traditional Qatari perfume.”

This … is CNN:

It’s like Friends, only more scripted with less wit. What is the news purpose of all this “zeitgeist” gathering from an Islamist emirate that beds down with Hamas? “There are a lot of smells right now,” one of the Phoebes remarks, perhaps unaware of the irony.

According to Dylan Byers at Puck, CNN employees feel the same way. They smell a rat, or perhaps more accurately, a grift. Eliana Johnson and Collin Anderson explain why:

The show is raising eyebrows inside CNN, where some staffers “have questioned whether this was a quid pro quo with Qatar,” Dylan Byers of Puck reported on Friday. CNN says that’s nonsense. The network told Byers and the Free Beacon that editorial content “is fully controlled and funded by CNN.”

The oxymoronic claim that editorial content is “funded” by CNN while “facilities and technical support” are funded by the Qataris would make little sense to anyone with an understanding of television news production. Even allowing CNN’s euphemistic use of the phrase “facilities and technical support,” Qatar’s subsidization of the production costs would, according to any established American news organization’s editorial standards and practices, be “sponsored content”—that is, an advertorial about Qatar—and would need to be identified as such. That is, unless CNN suspended its editorial guidelines in order to take Qatari funds for its “purpose-built studio with custom workspaces, designed to enable dynamic content creation and collaborative, spontaneous work among the team,” as CNN described its Qatar-funded offices in a press release earlier this month. 

CNN said at the outset the show would not be identified as sponsored content, and indeed it was not. “If anything produced in this facility is sponsored it will be labeled as sponsored content, as it is in all cases wherever it is produced, anything that isn’t sponsored won’t be,” a CNN spokesman told the Free Beacon in February.

Say … didn’t CNN make that claim about its collaboration with the Saddam regime in Baghdad too? How did that work out?

Johnson and Anderson remind readers that the Qatari emirate is not an oasis of free speech and unrestricted news. The regime bans publication of criticism of the emirate, and it exercises full power to censor anything that they deem harmful. They haven’t been shy about arresting journalists using trespassing as pretexts to pressure outlets to conform to their propaganda demands. 

So what is CNN doing in Qatar, other than commercials for the emirs? Maybe we should ask Eason Jordan. 

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