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"CNN has put a tremendous strain on the print press," says Thomas Winship, editor emeritus of the Boston Globe and a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. "During the past five years, print has been clobbered by television and has generally failed to respond by emphasizing the analytic and investigative stories that TV cannot do so well." Jim Hoagland, a two-time Pulitzer prizewinner for his international coverage in the Washington Post, says, "The effect of CNN should be to persuade newspapers that the stenographic mode of reporting is obsolete, a real dinosaur. The simple news account of an event that much of our audience has already witnessed is no longer sufficient. We've got to shift to a more analytical mode or find the story that TV couldn't or didn't cover." The plight of newspapers in a video age has rarely been more vivid than during the early days of the gulf war and the Soviet leadership crisis. News columns looked as though they had been put together simply by watching CNN the night before. Analyses were interesting but often nearly 24 hours out of date and no longer relevant.
For some social theorists, CNN has become far more than a news medium. It is considered prime evidence for the evolution of McLuhan's borderless world. As corporations become multinational and free trade transcends tariffs, as Europe develops a single currency and other regions build spheres of economic cooperation, as pop culture and air travel and migration and, yes, television make the world psychologically smaller, these theorists contend that the concept of nationalism recedes. Says Joshua Meyrowitz, professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire: "Many of the things that define national sovereignty are fading. National sovereignty wasn't based only on power and barbed wire; it was based also on information control. Nations are losing control over informational borders because of CNN."
NOT EVERYONE LIKES CNN OR rates its influence so positively. U.S. conservatives have complained for years about its tolerant attitude toward erstwhile communist leaderships and other dictatorships, which they see as a cynical ploy to assist the network in doing business in those countries or as a boost to Turner's personal ambitions as a world peacemaker. These critics were appalled when Turner himself genially interviewed Fidel Castro. They were outraged when CNN left reporter Peter Arnett in place in Baghdad throughout the gulf war to convey the Iraqi point of view. Some business executives also perceive ardent environmentalism at CNN as another attitude encouraged, if not imposed, by the ecology-minded Turner. More liberal observers also question CNN's detachment. Washington Post columnist Hoagland describes the network as responsible and fair but adds, "It seems to me that they are probably more sensitive to host-government reaction than most journalistic organizations would be because of their approach of trying to be everywhere. And it seems to me that they lean over backward to carry what I think of often as non-news from countries where they clearly want to be in that market." For example, he cites reports on economic development from Central Europe that look like video press releases about new factories.