It Has Not Been A Good Week Internationally For CNN – China Is Still Angry And Then It Seems Just The Mention Of Richard Quest Is Taboo

Philip Stone April 25, 2008

Internationally, it has not been one of CNN’s best weeks – the Chinese are still mad about on-air comments and in return there have been demonstrations in the streets and cyber attacks on its web site, and then there is the embarrassment of handling the Richard Quest affair – so far not a single word on that has passed from any CNN spokesperson. The subject seems taboo, or perhaps the company hopes the situation will just go away if they pull the ostrich act of putting their heads in the sand.

The Quest story – his arrest for carrying methamphetamines and being ordered to undergo treatment plus the embarrassing lurid details of the arrest as described by the New York Post – has put CNN into a real quandary. Quest is one of CNN International’s best known personalities and yet there seems to be hardly a place on the globe that did not report the Post’s details surrounding the arrest – and neither Quest nor CNN has disputed the Post’s account -- so can he continue to be the best known face representing the cable news network around the world.

Complicating matters is that Quest’s two monthly feature programs – Business Traveler and Quest – have received heavy sponsorship from big Middle East companies such as Egypt’s ARTOC Investment group and Qatar Airlines and the Post’s details of the arrest won’t go down well in that part of the world and beyond, so will Middle East sponsors now cut and run?

A little further afield in Singapore, for instance, gay sex by law is “an act of gross indecency” punishable by up to two years in jail, and just this month alone the country fined a TV station for showing a program that promoted “a gay lifestyle” and earlier in the month it fined a cable system for showing a commercial in which two lesbians kissed.

All of New York’s media played the Quest arrest straight except for the Post that published lurid details that were not part of the charge sheet. And people are beginning to ask why the Post did that? The Post, of course, as a sleazy tabloid can claim that is what it does, but does it go further than that?

Several bloggers are linking the fact that the Post is owned by News Corp. which in turn owns the Fox cable news channel, a fierce competitor to CNN. And if The Post, therefore, can take down one of CNN’s big personalities, then that’s bonus points for the Fox team. No way of knowing if there is any truth to that, but if there is then it’s a sad commentary if competition between two news organizations of stature boils down to going out of one’s way to ruin a man’s career.

FTM has asked CNN International twice now in the past two days for comment on the Quest affair and all we get is “Not at this time”. No explanation why. One can only surmise how sensitive a subject it must be within the company, let alone what legalities are involved. Quest’s CNN colleagues are also reluctant to talk about him – he is not universally admired there – but the capsule of their thoughts boils down to a comment from one colleague who said, "Richard is in hell."

Note how CNN handles two big media cases. On Quest it has yet to comment – which under one interpretation says it has yet to stand by its man -- but a couple of weeks back when China bitterly complained about “goons and thugs” comments made by CNN analyst Jack Cafferty the network promptly stood by Cafferty, coming out with a clarification of his comments, and trying to dampen a protest before it became a full-blown crisis. The dampening didn’t work – there were street protests outside CNN’s bureau in Los Angeles – and there have been frequent cyber attacks on CNN’s web site in the past week which, while not bringing the site down, has slowed it a bit and caused problems for some ISPs around the world.

But bottom line – thus far CNN has not left Cafferty to the wolves. Yet on Quest CNNs silence is deafening. (See followup on CNN statement here)

Indeed China seems to have adopted the attitude that the best defense is a good offense. It was already angry at CNN for what it considered biased and wrong reporting of the protests in Tibet, so Cafferty’s comments were more like the icing on the cake. Apart from the New York and Los Angeles street protests – which brought up questions of how controlled by the Chinese government are Chinese students who are studying in the US – there have also been demonstrations and boycotts in China against the French supermarket Carrefour because of the protests that took place in Paris a couple of weeks back when the Olympic torch passed, with great difficulty, through the streets.

China was particularly unhappy that Jin Jing, a wheelchair-bound Paralympics fencer and Olympics torch bearer, was attacked by protesters who tried to take the torch from her, and there were numerous pictures of her fiercely protecting it. An instant heroine when she returned back to China, but then she went down a notch or two when she said she opposed the Carrefour boycott. Meanwhile, trying to defuse things, French President Nicolas Sarkozy dispatched French Senate President Christian Poncelet to Shanghai to deliver a personal letter of apology and to invite her back to Paris, and there are noises from both sides that relations should get back to normal.

Not so, however, for CNN. If the network thought the worst was over with the Chinese then it got that wrong. In a civil suit filed in Beijing a group  of Chinese lawyers are suing Cafferty and CNN for some  $1.3 billion – that’s about $1 per person in China – and it’s just one more aggravation the cable news company has on its hands. It may sound like a nuisance suit, but if the court accepts the case, and it eventually goes against CNN, then what happens come collection time? International writs for CNN assets?

With the Quest affair, CNN has a habit of not saying anything when it bounces its better known correspondents who had sexual innuendo hanging over their heads. Remember Africa correspondent Jeff Koinange? He seemed to have a great career before him – he had made his name reporting from Darfur, on reporting on the fighting and kidnappings in Nigeria’s oil region which the Nigerian government really didn’t like, and CNN also brought him and several other international correspondents to New Orleans to help on its Katrina coverage.  But then sexual innuendo stories appeared on the Internet and Koinange’s bio was suddenly gone from CNN’s web site. When that happened, in May, 2007, all that CNN said, when asked, was that Koinange “is no longer employed at CNN, and we are not commenting beyond that."

At least for now CNN’s web site still carries Quest’s bio and if there are no comments coming from CNN spokespeople then perhaps the closest we’ll come on knowing  Quest’s fate is to keep looking daily to see if CNN still posts his bio on their site.