Conflict Coverage Promotion: High Quality or High Concept? A multimodal analysis of claims-making in conflict coverage promotional spots of Al Jazeera English and CNN International

Chapter 2: 24-hour News:
While I will introduce the two relevant 24-hour news channels below, the conflicts taken into consideration for this study will not get special attention for two reasons: first, the Arab uprisings including Egypt and the intervention in Libya are rather recent events with a lot of international media attention and therefore widely known, and second, it is not the conflicts that are under scrutiny here, but the promotion of their television news coverage. A basic understanding of the two broadcasters, however, might facilitate grasping their choice of self-promotion, their set of values.
2.1 CNN International:
The 24-hour Cable News Network (CNN) is available to approximately 2 billion people in more than 200 countries around the world. In the initial stages after its launch in 1980, however, the news channel could merely reach 1.7 million homes within the United States (Cushion, 2010, p.16). After expanding its domestic reach in the early 1980s, CNNs founder, Ted Turner, decided to combine the signals of the two original channels, CNN and Headline News in 1985. CNN started broadcasting on satellite to a worldwide audience and CNN International (CNNi) was born. (Cushion, 2010, p.18; Flournoy andamp; Stewart, 1997, p.3)
According to Flournoy and Stewart CNN built much of its reputation as a credible source for international news on the basis of its on-the-spot reporting from such locales as Tiananmen Square in Beijing in May 1989, Baghdad under siege in January 1991, and the Parliament Building in Moscow in August 1991 (1997, p.7). Here, especially the case of Iraq is interesting, as CNN managed to produce exclusive, live images of the early stages of the conflict, putting not just the station, but 24-hour news as a whole, into the global limelight. This was possible because CNN journalists had built up diplomatic ties with the Iraqi regime (Cushion, 2010, p.18-19). Today, Turner Broadcasting claims CNN to be one of the world s most

Christian Veits was born in Austria in 1984 and has studied media management in Germany, Chinese language in China, and journalism in Denmark and the United Kingdom.