This Is CNN

AT least CNN retracted its accusation that American special forces had used nerve gas on American ``defectors'' in Laos in 1970. As the Media Research Center has noted, ABC handled a similar case of journalistic malfeasance less creditably. After its Prime Time Live in 1991 helped union forces -- using faked resumes, hidden cameras, and staged events -- press their claim that the non-union Food Lion supermarket chain deliberately sold tainted meat, the segment's producers got promotions and raises. The executive producer, later personally fined $35,000 by a jury, ended up with a fancy new job: Richard Kaplan became president of domestic news at CNN.

Despite Kaplan's role as creator of the show NewsStand, which aired the unsubstantiated nerve-gas charges, he has not even been rebuked. The reason: CNN is desperate to add some ABC-style magazine-show pizzazz to its evening lineup. The Pew Research Center noted last month that only 23 per cent of respondents said they watched CNN regularly, down from 35 per cent in 1993. The Boston Globe reported that CNN's average numbers from April through June dropped to just 348,000 households a day, ``about as many viewers as Country Music Television.''

The appointment of Kaplan, a golfing buddy of President Clinton's, also signaled CNN's intention to slant the news to please the White House. Just this year, Kaplan has aired a two-hour special berating the media for over-covering the Lewinsky scandal, an hour-long special bashing Ken Starr, even an hour-long special trashing House Republican congressman Dan Burton. Thus CNN's focus on yet another liberal hobbyhorse, the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, seemed as politically tendentious as it did sensationalistic.

CNN hung on to reporter Peter Arnett even though he was the public face of the discredited report. Remember the infamous report that U.S. jets had bombed an Iraqi infant-formula factory? Arnett admitted in March 1991 that he really didn't know whether his Baghdad reporting was true, and he ``didn't go deep down'' to try to find out. The two producers whom CNN actually fired, April Oliver and Jack Smith, had a similar mindset. Smith explained, ``[CNN executives] have gagged us. . . . This is a cave to the military establishment, to the secret army which is one step away from the secret police.''

This is what comes of ingesting liberalism, 24 hours a day.