News from Abroad by Donald Shanor

Author:Donald Shanor [Shanor, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780231122412
Google: x6ARoW0UWGMC
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003-01-15T03:30:20+00:00

REGIONAL CABLE

Regional cable news stations were born a decade after CNN, with New England Cable News, and have since spread across the country, from Northwest in Seattle, Texas in Dallas, and Midway in Chicago.

New England Cable News (NECN) and its counterparts elsewhere in the country fit between the networks and local stations, covering a region. But unlike regional cable operations such as the Belo Company’s in Texas, NECN has no ties to a larger entity. Belo’s Texas Cable trades news with WFAA in Dallas and KHOU in Houston as well the company’s main newspaper, the Dallas Morning News. NECN, which is jointly owned by the Hearst Corporation and AT&T Broadband, stands alone, not only in its lack of affiliations, but also in the international scope of its coverage.

NECN’s founder, Philip Balboni, says that being independent gives the station the power to set its own agenda. Executive editor Iris Adler pointed out that no lines are drawn between what happens in New England and what New Englanders are interested in, which gives the station a reason to cover international affairs. Because NECN covers a region from Connecticut to Maine that includes some of the nation’s top universities and an electronics research and development corridor along Boston’s Route 128 second only to Silicon Valley, foreign news is a natural fit.

NECN’s commitment grew from two sources: the discovery by its producers and reporters of the many international connections in Boston, Hartford, and the other cities of the region, and the interests and background of a key anchor, R. D. Sahl.

Covering the community well, not just its crime and conflagrations, “means that you learn about interesting stories with international tie-ins,” Adler explained, “and that’s part of what NECN has become known for.” One project involved a specialist at Harvard who founded an AIDS clinic in Haiti to try to deal with the epidemic there. NECN’s reporting on slavery in Sudan was an earlier international effort. “It grew out of our covering the antislavery group in Boston and led to reporting in Sudan,” Adler said. “I don’t think the other stations even know there’s an anti-slavery society.”23

The program, “Freedom for Sale,” chronicled a slave redemption trip, during which people from the West bought the freedom of Sudanese slaves who had been abducted by the militia in the north of the country during the long-running civil war between the fundamentalist northern Muslims and the mostly black, Christian, and animist people of the south. NECN’s Lorne Matalon took viewers to the actual purchase of the slaves, told the stories of their forced servitude, and reported the views of advocates on how the practice could be stopped.

Sahl, who has a master’s degree in international relations, reports and produces stories from Europe and Asia in breaks from his nightly anchor duties. He researches and organizes his trips and arranges support for them from foundations. “Boston has a large foreign and a large Catholic population, and the networks simply aren’t doing these things.” But NECN’s international outlook transcends these two factors.

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