Is CNN Promoting Fear?

I was invited to see the 'premiere' of CNN's In the Footsteps of Bin Laden this week with a crowd of media wonks and and administration toadies (Iraq war cheerleader Judy Miller was in the audience). At the pre-party, CNN's beauty queen Paula Zahn accidentally stepped on my toe with her high heel and disingenuously apologized, touching my shoulder and smiling at me with her perfect teeth, "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said and turned away just as fast to a group of suits which happened to include the new editor-in-chief of Time magazine. Three days earlier, I had just purchased the shoes I was wearing ($120, a tremendous amount of money for me) and was kind of protective of my expensive new footwear. Paula's shoes probably cost 3x that.

Despite the star-studded hoopla, it became quite evident that In the Footsteps of Bin Laden was little more than a run-of-the-mill TV news program when the room darkened and the show began. Two hours long and expensively-produced, the show featured reporter Christiane Amanpour who scored some good interviews with Bin Laden's early friends and teachers who, for the most part, described him as a "shy, quiet boy" who didn't seem capable of orchestrating the horrible events of September 11. Interesting? Relevant? Perhaps, but such interviews are pretty much equivalent to a local reporter who interviews a serial killer's neighbor.

To get to my point, the show seemed to have a double motive. While purporting to be a clear and unbiased view of Bin Laden's life, it was anything but. Through dramatic music, sensationalized storytelling, gratuitous use of 9/11 imagery, and obvious innuendo, the Amanpour told us that Bin Laden was plotting new attacks on America, horrific attacks of an unimaginable scale. The program ended with a picture of New York City shrouded in the smoke of September 11th, as if to say: "You aint seen nothing yet."

To me, this is exactly the kind of programming that stokes fear that makes people feel vulnerable to attack and less likely to question the administration’s motives behind its wars and civil rights violations. It makes me feel like CNN sits snugly inside the administration’s pocket and, with known collaborators like Judy Miller in the audience (who was thanked from the stage, no less), it doesn’t look very good for our supposedly fair-minded media.