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August 28, 2007

CNN's Scheduling Bias

In CNN's 3-part series, "God's Warriors," Christiane Amanpour repeated the phrase "God's Jewish warriors" 20 times, but said "Muslim warriors" only four times. Was CNN trying to place extra emphasis on the Jewish warriors and less on the Muslim warriors?

Maybe.

When it comes to CNN's programming schedule, though, there is no doubt that the network was emphasizing the sins of the Jews. As of this week, CNN has broadcast its "Jewish Warriors" program a total of five times. The segment on the other two religions, on the other hand, have been aired only three times. Last Saturday night, CNN rebroadcast the segment about Jews twice, while rebroadcasting the other two segments only once. And again on Sunday night, the Jewish Warriors program got double duty.

On top of this, though CNN felt it was worthwhile to change the order of the Christian and Muslim segment from Saturday to Sunday — presumably so that the segment that played late-night on Saturday would run a bit earlier the following evening — the Jewish segment remained in the prime, earlier spot.

Here is the CNN schedule for the past weekend:

Saturday

Eastern TimePacific Time
9pm6pmGod's Warriors - Jewish
11pm8pmGod's Warriors - Muslim
1am10pmGod's Warriors - Christian
3am12amGod's Warriors - Jewish

Sunday

Eastern TimePacific Time
9pm6pmGod's Warriors - Jewish
11pm8pmGod's Warriors - Christian
1am10pmGod's Warriors - Muslim
3am12amGod's Warriors - Jewish

Why did CNN run the Jewish segment twice? Why did it leave that segment in a prime time slot despite switching the order of the other two segments? Ask CNN.

Posted by at August 28, 2007 05:04 PM

Comments

I was terribly disappointed in this series, particularly after all the advertising hype in its behalf. Christiane Amanpour should have refused to narrate this shallow, poorly researched, unbalanced series. CNN should have put more money into its creation and been much more serious about the endeavor. Christians and Jews have their crazies and extremists, but none have advocated an international Christian caliphate or an international Jewish caliphate. How could you possibly treat these 3 groups as if they were on par one with another? I think it was outrageous and extremely misleading--and grossly harmful to our body politic who often take whatever CNN dishes out as Gospel-truth.

Posted by: Roger Courts at August 29, 2007 05:39 PM

I have one question. WHY?

Christiane Amanpour had 8 months to get this right and still made glaring omissions of fact and balance. Was this her choice, CNN's or some relatively anonymous director/editor's choice? Did she simply not research the material? Didn't she care?

Posted by: deegee at September 1, 2007 06:02 AM

I have lost a significant amount of confidence in CNN for allowing this one-sided, biased and grossly inaccurate account of "God's Warriors" to ever have beeen aired!

Posted by: R. Kaplan at September 16, 2007 12:32 PM

Why are you surprised? Amanpour's reports on Isarel have ALWAYS been, to make an understatement, biased against Israel.
And CNN is outright anti-Israel.

So don't be surprise and stop viewing CNN. It is simply not a new station, but a TV station with an agenda.

Posted by: Dan P at September 17, 2007 05:03 AM

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