Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
CNN isn’t a real news network, but on New Year’s Eve it can be pleasant to have it on while you’re doing other things – so that every hour, on the hour, you can look at the screen for a couple of minutes and see the arrival of the midnight hour celebrated with fireworks in one world capital after another.
To be sure, when the new year arrives in the Middle East, things on CNN start to get – well – a bit curious. This year, CNN’s coverage from the Gulf region was based in Abu Dhabi and hosted by CNN veteran Becky Anderson, who, during the several years she’s been living in that city, has been promoting it, and the United Arab Emirates generally, with a consistently fervid intensity. Her conduct on New Year’s Eve was no exception to the rule: even more than celebrating the New Year, Anderson’s assigned job for the evening seemed to be to celebrate the Gulf autocracies, especially the UAE.
Although I’ve heard a lot of criticism of CNN – virtually all of it amply justified – I don’t remember ever encountering a serious critique of its cozy relationship with the Emirates. Just now, however, a quick Internet search led me to an October 2021 blog entry by Adam Johnson that addresses precisely this subject. The occasion was Expo 2020 Dubai, a cutting-edge World’s Fair (its theme: “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future”) that, having been delayed by the COVID pandemic, took place from October 2021 to March 2022, welcoming millions of visitors and featuring displays by virtually every country on earth. Repeatedly, CNN described itself as Expo 2020’s “official broadcaster.”
Johnson’s blog entry wasn’t confined to CNN’s involvement with Expo 2020. It also contained links to no fewer than 106 “news” articles from CNN’s website in which the network “breezily promot[ed] the [UAE] dictatorship”; in all but one of them, there was “no disclosure of any kind that the content is paid sponsorship.” In August 2021 alone, for example, you could have read articles headlined “This center in Dubai is growing ‘future-proof’ food in the desert”; “This Dubai-based company wants to revolutionize how ports operate”; “Dubai is building an art collection–without buying art”; and “Dubai’s luxury megaproject Heart of Europe is creating a huge coral reef.” This isn’t news – it’s PR.
In his blog entry, Johnson quoted Eli Clifton – a staffer at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft – to the effect that CNN routinely sugarcoats the UAE, “an undemocratic nation with a problematic human rights record,” and that while CNN sometimes tags UAE-related content as being sponsored, the overwhelming majority of its “puffy UAE coverage” (to quote Clifton) is not described as sponsored.
And this matters. Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, U.S. entities – of which CNN is one – are required to register with the U.S. government if they produce and distribute sponsored content for UAE-based clients. You’d think CNN would’ve gotten in hot water a long time ago on this account. Yet so far, nobody in the U.S. government, as far as I know, has ever demanded that CNN follow this rule.
Yet if the U.S. government has turned the other way, several human-rights groups – among them Freedom Forward, Action Corps, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, and Center for International Policy – have not. In October 2021, all of these groups signed an open letter to CNN expressing concern about its role in Expo 2020 Dubai, demanding transparency about its UAE ties, and urging that CNN “commit to reporting on the UAE’s terrible human rights violations and their use of events like the ‘Expo 2020 Dubai’ for propaganda purposes.” This letter came a month after the European Parliament voted to boycott Expo 2020 Dubai in protest against the UAE’s human-rights record.
Were any of these facts, I wonder, ever reported on CNN?
Needless to say, the UAE’s effort to promote itself in the West as a modern and civilized country extends well beyond its relationship to CNN. The regime’s fully owned and widely advertised airline, Emirates, itself helps push the image of the UAE as a cutting-edge country. The airline, in turn, sponsorsseveral soccer teams, including Real Madrid; it’s an “official Worldwide Partner of the Rugby World Cup”; it’s a sponsor of the US Open, the Australian Open, and Wimbledon; and it sponsors both the Melbourne and Sydney symphony orchestras. Thanks to the UAE’s largesse, furthermore, Dubai has become a top international sports hub, home to such events as the Dubai World Cup (horse racing) and the DP World Tour (golf).
But it’s all a massive whitewash. Yes, the UAE has undergone extraordinary economic and technological advances. The skylines of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are modern. Their infrastructure is impressive. But this isn’t because the UAE is civilized – it’s because it has oil riches substantial enough to pay for the civilized world’s best architects and urban planners. The plain fact is that for all its surface progress, the UAE is still categorized by Freedom House as “Not Free.” Its Freedom House score is 18/100, which places it below even Haiti, Qatar, and Brunei.
Not that you’d ever hear a hint of this on CNN. Especially from Becky Anderson, whose genius for constantly singing the UAE’s praises was illustrated by an interview she gave recently to the Khaleej Times, a Dubai newspaper. In the interview, Anderson recalled that on her first visit to the UAE, back in 1999, she was driving through an undeveloped area with a local businessman when he said that by 2010, it would look like downtown Manhattan. He was right.
“Never bet against Dubai, is what I’ve learned!” Anderson told the interviewer, her eyes aglow. “Never bet against the UAE! Because of course when they say that they have a goal, when they say that they have a strategy, when they launch a vision, you know that they’re going to complete it!”
That one abominable quotation can stand for the whole of Anderson’s vomitous propagandizing.
It was no surprise, then, to see Anderson on yet another New Year’s Eve, gushing over her adopted homeland’s magnificent fireworks. Not that she was the only one on CNN promoting Gulf tyrannies. One of her CNN cronies rhapsodized over the pyrotechnics in Doha, Qatar (also categorized by Freedom House as “Not Free”), which, she enthused, included no fewer than 6500 drones; yet another colleague raved about the fireworks display in “the majestic kingdom of Bahrain” (also “Not Free”).
And speaking of Qatar: in 2025, CNN opened a new broadcast studio there, with the government partially footing the bill. Pointing out that this arrangement raises colossal questions (ya think?) about conflicts of interest, the Honest Reporting website excoriated the first episode of the new Doha-produced series CNN Creators, which “focuses on four relatively unknown, young, and hip CNN journalists marveling at all that the Qatari capital has to offer in such overt displays of fawning that it would make Walter Duranty blush.” So it’s apparently in Doha – the same city that’s famous for providing safe and luxurious homes for the leader of Hamas – that CNN is breeding the Becky Andersons of tomorrow.
To which one can only say: well, at least CNN’s shabby Qatar deal is (at least partly) out in the open. But how much of the UAE’s all but inexhaustible supply of cash has been passed under the table to CNN during the past several years? How much, in particular, has Becky Anderson pocketed? Given the pathetic state of CNN’s viewership figures, how else – other than by being paid surreptitiously by despots to spread disinformation – could this deplorable operation, with its ridiculous bureaus all over the world (“I’m Clarissa Ward in London, and this is CNN”), possibly be staying afloat?
Yet another question. This time around, I didn’t stay up late enough to see those two jackasses, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and his best friend, Andy Cohen, host the New Year’s segment from New York beginning at 8 p.m. EST. But I did find myself wondering how those two gay men feel about CNN’s chummy ties to at least two regimes that punish homosexuality with long prison terms and, potentially, with death. Imagine selling out so cheaply, especially when you’ve got Vanderbilt money – or, in Cohen’s case, a lucrative media career outsider of CNN!
Which brings us to one final question: is it possible that 2026 will be the year – finally – in which the last few fools who still take CNN seriously wake up and smell the coffee? For heaven’s sake, what more do you need to know than that an outfit which never says a positive word about Donald Trump can never stop extolling two of the planet’s worst tyrannies?
