The Monopoly is a memory

New York —  New York

HBO’s “Live From Baghdad” re-creates an almost quaint world, one where the Iraqi government and CNN used each other during the Gulf War in 1991 to the mutual benefit of both. Iraq largely got its story out and CNN stayed on the air, exclusively, as the bombing of Baghdad began.

It was an unambiguous triumph that put the little network on the map, to the envy of CBS, ABC and NBC -- at the time the other major players covering the conflict. As the world girds for a rerun of the Iraq-U.S. showdown, however, the largely laudatory and well-timed TV movie from a CNN sister network may give the all-news network a boost, but CNN faces much greater obstacles as it tries for a similar decisive victory in Round Two of the war of the media coverage.

In the intervening decade, the media landscape has been radically rearranged, and not just by the 1996 launch of Fox News Channel and MSNBC (which itself has a report Sunday night from Peter Arnett, one of the three CNN reporters who earned acclaim in Baghdad.)

Abroad, two British channels have come on strong. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News was widely acknowledged for its reporting from Kosovo in the late 1990s. Last year, the BBC, which has invested heavily since 1995 to expand its worldwide TV operations, arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan, just before the ruling Taliban was ousted. An exuberant John Simpson, the intrepid BBC world affairs editor on the scene, claimed to have liberated the city ahead of Northern Alliance troops, which drew him ribbing in the British press; nonetheless, he won an International Emmy award last week for the reporting.

But Western media may be trumped completely, this time, by the Arab world, which has not one but two regional networks: the Saudi-based Middle East Broadcasting Center, which has recently been trying to upgrade its reporting, and the Qatar-based Al Jazeera.

The latter is fast earning a mixed reputation for its renegade reporting, which has alienated many Arab leaders, and at times infuriated Washington, even as it has earned respect from viewers. It was the only network transmitting live from Kabul when Western bombing started in October 2001, and it has served, controversially, since then as a conduit for pronouncements from terror network Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

The 6-year-old network, started by Qatar ruler Sheik Hamad ibn Khalifa al Thani, has been kicked out of Jordan and the Kuwaitis have shut down its local offices, citing a lack of reporting objectivity. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, was recently shown on Iraqi television embracing Mohamed Jasim al-Ali, Al Jazeera’s managing director.

A recent Gallup poll, which the polling organization says it commissioned on its own, shows Al Jazeera gaining respect among its viewers, at the expense of local state-owned broadcasters. Some 54% of Kuwaiti residents said the channel is objective, as did 51% in Jordan, topping the objectivity rankings for channels available in the region; Middle East Broadcasting also earned relatively high objectivity rankings. By contrast, CNN earned high marks for objectivity from just 11% of Kuwaitis, 7% of Saudis and 5% of Jordanians. Nonetheless, 40% of Kuwaitis said they had tuned in to CNN at least once in the last week; tune-in was much lower in the other two countries. CNN says it is available in 6 million Middle East households.

If things had developed differently, CNN and Al Jazeera could have been colleagues, not rivals. Last year, according to several people familiar with the situation, Al Jazeera tried -- and failed -- to entice CNN to become a minority stakeholder. Since then, relations between the two have cooled, after CNN aired an Osama bin Laden video that Al Jazeera had received but didn’t run. The two still maintain a video-sharing arrangement.

For leaders looking to get their message across in the U.S., CNN has competition as well. Al Jazeera and Middle East Broadcasting, which is financed by Saudi business leader Sheik Waleed bin Ibrahim Al Ibrahim, are seen in the U.S. via satellite. Al Jazeera is exploring becoming even more accessible by adding an English-language voice-over audio option, with hopes for a full-blown English language channel later next year.

The BBC, too, has made U.S. inroads. In the space of a year, it has ramped up its distribution and today its nightly newscasts air commercial-free on public stations reaching 90% of U.S. viewers, as well as on the BBC America cable channel. Abroad, building on the back of its venerable BBC Radio presence, BBC World is gaining on CNN in news coverage and distribution, says Richard Sambrook, BBC news chief executive. The channel “is meant to be a global service for a global audience,” he says, and tries to avoid a particularly British point of view. Still, he says, it is “an open question how many channels the [world ad] market can sustain.”

Nonetheless, the easier access to distribution has other governments contemplating whether they, too, need to be players on the world scene. French President Jacques Chirac proposed a government-financed “French CNN” during his spring reelection campaign, but the idea was dropped because of its high cost. Instead, the French are concentrating on news offerings on the internationally distributed French-language TV5 channel, which is gaining modest U.S. traction as a premium option on Echostar and digital cable systems and on basic cable in parts of French-speaking Louisiana and Maine.

CNN says it doesn’t feel threatened by the new competition. The CNN International channel reached a mere 10 million households outside the U.S. in 1991; today, CNN International is in 170 million homes, says Eason Jordan, CNN’s chief news-gathering executive. “Yes, there’s more competition,” he says, but the network has “grown 17-fold. And decision makers are still watching CNN.” In recent interviews, however, CNN executives said they see the future of their international efforts more in foreign-language channels they are mounting in partnership with local broadcasters in places such as Turkey and Germany.

In real life, unlike in the HBO movie, Jordan played a key role in CNN’s Baghdad triumph; more recently Iraqi officials have accused him of being with the CIA. Like many media executives, one of Jordan’s key worries is that the new media landscape will mean a more hostile environment for his reporters.

CNN, which has had the most extensive ongoing Iraq presence of U.S. networks in recent years, has been beefing up its staff in the country and the region, as have its rivals. But staffing is subject to the whims of the Iraqis, who periodically take issue with Western reporters, prohibiting some from renewing their short-term visas and threatening to expel others, even as they have recently welcomed NBC’s Tom Brokaw and ABC’s Ted Koppel.

“Certainly, the Iraqis view Western media differently,” Jordan says. Hostage-taking and chemical and biological weapons are a concern; moreover, Western reporters in Baghdad must work from the Ministry of Information building, which also includes two cabinet ministers’ offices, potential targets for U.S. bombs.

At a recent HBO panel discussion after a screening of the CNN movie, ABC News correspondent Deborah Amos said Al Jazeera in particular is “changing the stakes” for Western reporters. “Saddam doesn’t need CNN this time. I don’t think any of us knows what that means for the reaction to American television reporters on the ground,” she said, but added, “I think we’ve seen our last safe war.”