CNN's iffy proposition

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — CNN is about to launch its Next Great Hope — the show that will make us all forget that horrendous cat fight "Crossfire" and take the world's oldest 24-hour news channel into the 21st century. Even though Wolf Blitzer is hosting it.

There are, however, a couple of problems with the concept behind "The Situation Room," which premieres today at 1 p.m. MDT, that nobody at CNN seems to have considered.

Blitzer promises that the show will "bring together old-fashioned, good, solid, serious journalism" and at the same time take "advantage of the new capability to bring in multiple feeds" into their news studio and control room, based in the nation's capital. "We're not going to compromise on journalism, but we are going to take you behind the scenes and let the viewers see what we see as we're getting it."

He told those of us who toil in print media that it will be "like in a newsroom just before you go to press (with) all the excitement and the various pressures and all the pressures that are unfolding."

Well, right there you've got Big Problem No. 1. Those of us who have spent time in a newsroom can tell you that anyone watching a newspaper get put together would be bored beyond tears. Not that we don't have fun doing it — well, at least some of us — but it would be like putting cameras inside the post office and watching the mail get sorted.

Without anyone going postal. At least not very often.

(I, personally, have not been in the office for weeks, so the number of times anyone has gone postal at the Deseret Morning News has been down of late.)

That old adage about how you don't want to watch sausage — or news — being put together definitely applies. And "The Situation Room" is three hours long. That's three hours every day, Monday through Friday. Really.

But that's minor compared to Big Problem No. 2. Blitzer went out of his way to tell us that, what with his fancy, schmancy new studio and its two huge video walls, he and the folks at CNN are "going to try to make sure that our viewers see what we're seeing" — that we're going to be shown "live pictures that are coming into our control room" as events happen.

The concept is that if one of CNN's reporters has a story that suddenly "pops up," then Blitzer will be "going to them and we're going to let our viewers get it when we get it."

Um, Really Big Problem No. 2 is that television news tends to get in the most trouble when it's reporting on the fly. Unsubstantiated reports that have to be retracted, gossip, innuendo, baloney — whatever you want to call it — is the product of putting things on the air as they happen.