And so farewell, CNN

by Rick Johansen

Another big news event; another opportunity to watch CNN’s brilliant breaking news programmes, hosted by such great broadcasters as Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper and a small army of reporters on whichever ground is required. The rolling coverage of Hurricane Ida has been mind-blowingly brilliant. How I shall miss it.

I don’t know the first time I got hooked. I suspect it may have been the police in their slow motion car chase of OJ Simpson and the subsequent trial. Seven years later, it was 9/11 and the loop images of jet airliners crashing into the Twin Towers. And, more recently, the insurrection in Washington, the disastrous western exit from Afghanistan and, currently, Hurricane Ida, there is only one place to go.

The day after tomorrow, CNN will no longer be part of my Virgin Media package, although those of you who have Sky will suffer no such loss. The reason? CNN is moving into the field of erecting a paywall. If I want to get CNN on my computer, it will cost be £2 a month or just shy of £20 a year. Not a great deal, you might say, but Virgin already mops up a substantial chunk of our income and there comes a time when you say enough is enough.

I will still have the BBC, diminished as it is by its fearful kowtowing to Boris Johnson’s horrible government, and Sky News which, it pains me to say, has far higher journalistic standards than BBC News, certainly in holding the government to account. But I shall miss CNN which I feel calls it like it is. They ripped into Donald Trump when he lied about election fraud but they have done the same to Joe Biden over Afghanistan. It seems to me that some people are so caught up in much of of the BBC’s current news output which has lurched to a centre right position in so much as it reports government lies as facts and does little to challenge them that they see CNN as left of centre. I see no such bias, but then my entire world view is, in old fashioned terms, left of centre. (We shall return another day to the left/right debate which is becoming increasingly irrelevant as time goes by.)

I’m not sure many people will bother to pay what CNN is demanding because news is available free at the point of delivery, so to speak, elsewhere. And, frankly, it will not be that hard to find free streams, not of course that I recommend you do that.

I’ll miss it, that’s for sure. My favourite interview with anyone, ever, was when Anderson Cooper interviewed the great Christopher Hitchens following the death of religious fanatic Jerry Falwell. If they had stuff like this every day, I’d willingly pay far more than £2 a week.

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