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CNN is news without stars, news without end, and virtually news without editing. With the notable exception of a few Big Three network émigrés, including Washington Reporters Schorr and Bernard Shaw, most of CNN'S regular on-air personnel are unfamiliar and even unimposing. They tend to be former local station anchors and reporters. Odd for a service founded by a master of self-publicity, CNN is almost entirely devoid of show-business pizazz. That sometimes makes it dull. But at the same time it diminishes the worrisome phenomenon of the reporter's on-air personality overshadowing the news. Says Schorr: "We spend our time getting out of the way of the news. We have demystified what an anchor does because we have so many."
CNN is there for the viewer whenever it is convenient for him. The late Communications Theorist Marshall McLuhan envisaged television as creating a sort of global village into which everyone could plug merely by turning on his set. Indeed, much of the psychic appeal of television, as opposed to film or print, is its immediacy: you can be there at the moment something happens. But until CNN, every TV news show had a closed narrative structure of beginning, middle and end. The world was tied up into neat packages and presented at fixed hours, after the fact, except for coverage of the most extraordinary events. Turner's news, by contrast, stretches on, sometimes haphazardly, like life.
The absence of pressure to make choices, to pare down and winnow out, means that CNN can explore the day's issues at enough length to avoid the pitfalls of oversimplicity and superficiality. But it can also waste viewers' time. Moreover, the heavily scheduled rookie reporters sometimes bring scant backgrounds to the stories they cover. Says one senior insider: "They do not always understand that length is not depth." That problem has been compounded by a lack of decisive leadership since Schonfeld left. And it could worsen: several of the overworked and underpaid producers are being romanced by the Big Three networks. There are other significant failings. Visual quality is often shabby, with footage lopsided or out of focus, and some employees suggest that equipment is in short supply and inadequately maintained. Commentators sometimes read from notes so that they display less of their faces than the tops of their heads. Even CNN'S all-inclusive approach to Government events draws some in-house criticism. The former policy of gavel-to-gavel coverage of often tedious congressional hearings, says one insider, was "lazy journalism." Although CNN airs some specials, it has no documentary unit comparable to the 60 Minutes team at CBS or the Close-Up producers at ABC.
Yet CNN has plainly made its established competitors wary. Until recently the offices of news executives at the Big Three networks each contained three monitors, tuned to ABC, NBC and CBS. Now in many there is a fourth, tuned to CNN. On a few occasions, CNN'S lean operation has outpointed the far more heavily staffed networks. CNN was the first to report that President Reagan had in fact been hit during John Hinckley's assassination attempt in March 1981, in part because it stayed on the air while ABC and CBS resumed regular programming after telling viewers, as was first believed, that the