The InstaMan links to Bruce Fierstein’s discussion of CNN World Report, a lovely program mostly consisting of English-language propaganda clips from third-world state-run broadcasters. Unlike Fierstein, I distinctly remember it being broadcast on U.S. CNN until fairly recently (well into the 1990s), probably until CNN International was forked off to become a separate network (instead of a jumbled amalgam of CNN’s domestic network and CNN Headline News, which it was in the early 1990s).

CNN International does get some domestic play, running on CNNfn during the overnight hours. The best I can tell of it is that it’s a bad imitation of BBC World, basically redoing CNN with Commonwealth accents and commercials while doing a mid-Atlantic hybrid of American-style and British-style reporting and succeeding at neither.

As for World Report, it always struck me as relatively harmless so long as the viewer was consciously aware that it was basically government propaganda. Unfortunately, CNN never made much of an effort to identify it explicitly as such, only billing it as “uncensored and unedited” but not mentioning that it was CNN who wasn’t doing any of the censoring or editing and that the production choices weren’t CNN’s. In other words, not unlike CNN’s behavior in Baghdad, where you got “uncensored and unedited” reports from the events and places Baghdad Bob wanted you to broadcast; since nobody in Atlanta was leading the reporters around by the nose, it was apparently perfectly legitimate reportage in CNN’s eyes.