CNN raised eyebrows in February when it announced an expansion to Qatar, the Hamas-friendly Gulf monarchy that bans criticism of the government and spreading “rumors” or “fake news” with ill intent.
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.”
“There’s a lot of smells right now,” Antoinette Radford, a former breaking news writer on secondment from CNN’s London bureau, announces. The hosts take turns introducing themselves and offering superlatives. Ivana Scatola, a digital video producer (also from the London bureau), is “bossy.” Radford is “Gen-Z” and “diva.”
Back in studio, co-host Bijan Hosseini indicates he wants the show to cover “zeitgeist things, which is a fun word, but it’s trendy, what’s popular, what you talk about over dinner,” for people who talk about how exciting Qatar is at dinner. Radford is focused on “doing stories for the girlies, we know that the girlies are not consuming news.” Such insights come in the wake of a “two-week bootcamp” CNN put on for the “creators” in London, where they met with Christiane Amanpour, the veteran broadcaster who was last seen humiliating the network by arguing that the Israeli hostages tortured and starved in Hamas tunnels for two years were “treated better than the average Gazan.”
While CNN has not released ratings for the inaugural Creators episode, commenters are weighing in. “This is so cringe it hurt…” the top comment on a YouTube cut of the show reads. “My algorithm has failed me,” another user wrote. “Cringe. Infantilising,” said a third. “I’m sure this show will have hundreds of viewers,” a fourth predicted.
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.
Qatar’s penal code criminalizes criticism of its government and flag and bans the posting of online content that the Qatari regime deems harmful. The Qatari regime has arrested student journalists associated with American universities like Northwestern and prevented them from reporting, even within the gates of Education City, the Doha-based compound where Qatar has provided tens of millions of dollars to incentivize American universities to open branch campuses.
The repressive monarchy has done the same with CNN’s Doha home, known as Media City, offering “significant financial benefits, including attractive incentives and opportunities for investment” as well as a “supportive regulatory environment” for media companies. Qatar, in turn, gets glowing coverage like that offered by CNN Creators.
“As Qatar’s media hub, Media City Qatar is excited to welcome CNN to our ecosystem, a place where the world’s most respected media brands can come together, collaborate, and innovate,” the head of Media City, Sheikh Dr. Abdulla bin Ali Al Thani, said in February. “This expansion signals the continued growth of Qatar’s strategic role in shaping global conversations from the heart of the Middle East – because here, where next is made, we are not only witnessing progress; we are making it happen.”
So what is CNN really getting from the Qataris in exchange for hard-hitting “editorial content” of Londoners frolicking around a souk extolling their surroundings? They won’t say.
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