When it pulls out the stops, CNN’s reporting on the Middle East is unparalleled. In the wake of the brutal murder by the Saudi Arabian state of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, CNN broke scoop after scoop on the slaying—especially on how Turkish intelligence had pieced together his murder and realised that the orders must have come from the top. It was forensic public interest reporting, and rightly recognised as such.
Not everything that comes out of that region hits that standard, alas. Increasingly, CNN’s output from the Middle East raises eyebrows—both inside and outside the broadcaster—in terms of its tone, its tenor, and particularly who is involved in producing it.
One recent standout is “CNN Creators”, a format launched with great fanfare as “the first show to be anchored out of the network’s brand new, state-of-the-art facility within Media City Qatar, in Doha”. Instead of traditional journalists, it is anchored by four fresh-faced “multiplatform content creators, each with their own unique background, interests, skills, and perspective”.
The launch video looked more like second-tier influencer content produced for a sponsor in exchange for a freebie. “Hey, we’re here,” one shouts cheerfully at the start, as the four hosts squeeze into shot for a selfie. “Welcome to…” they say before another jumps cheerfully into frame wearing a Qatar hat. Hard-hitting it is not.
Of course, not everything can be Watergate, and nor should it be—news is always a mix of serious and silly; culture and lifestyle mixing with traditional hard news topics. But current and former CNN staff are baffled and concerned by their supposed flagship new show in the region.
The actual show features the four “newsfluencers” talking awkwardly in the studio as they introduce fairly anodyne CNN-style news packages, fronted by themselves. The fifth episode, on AI, has been online for a month. Despite going out on CNN’s main YouTube channel, with 19m subscribers, it has just 17,000 views there. At the time of writing, this is the Creators’ best-performing episode on this channel. A spokesperson for CNN said: “CNN Creators has published 27 videos, which have generated 21.2m views across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, CNN Shorts and on CNN.com.”
CNN Creators is not the first misplaced effort by an old media network to capture a younger audience, but it has served to renew concerns about CNN’s complicated commercial relationships in the region.
Three years ago, CNN launched “CNN Business Arabic” as “a digital business platform”, working in partnership with private firm International Media Investments, generally known as IMI. IMI is better known in the UK for its long-running and ultimately unsuccessful bid to buy the Telegraph, in partnership with the US investment company RedBird. After a protracted battle launched by the Telegraph newsroom against its prospective owner, the deal fell through last November over concerns about foreign investment.
That’s because IMI is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corporation, which is itself controlled by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan—a senior member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, with numerous official roles reflecting that status.
CNN’s ties with the state go deeper: it runs “CNN Academy Abu Dhabi” in partnership with the state’s Creative Media Authority, giving UAE nationals and residents experience in the newsroom and a chance to meet journalists. (Other CNN Academies exist worldwide). Rani Raad, the president of CNN Commercial Worldwide who oversaw the launch of the partnership with IMI in 2023, went on to become IMI’s CEO—though he departed in June last year.
The cosiness of these commercial relationships sits uncomfortably with some CNN journalists, who note the scrupulousness and rigour with which the company usually operates. CNN is such a stickler for factchecking that if one of its reporters turns on the BBC and sees the prime minister resigning live on air, they still have to phone Number 10 to corroborate before reporting it.
Staff have been assured that protections separating the newsroom from commercial operations still apply, but some are nervous nonetheless—particularly as it seems that one way or another, CNN is up for sale.
In December, Netflix announced a bid to buy most of CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. But under its proposals CNN and Warner Bros’ other cable channels would be carved off, ostensibly as an independent company, but almost certainly, in reality, to await purchase by another bidder.
Paramount, recently purchased by Trump ally and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, has launched a rival hostile bid for Warner Bros—this time including CNN—with an offer part-funded by the state investment companies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been credited with a role in pulling the bid together.
Either scenario could see CNN’s already murky commercial and investment relationships with Middle Eastern states become more complex still, especially at a time when President Trump and his family are advancing their own business interests in the region and with its ruling families, too.
CNN, like other news outlets, is evidently not wrong to be focusing on the Middle East—there is no shortage of news happening there. The question is whether its investment and commercial ties are helping it tell those stories, or whether they’re simply getting in the way.
This article has been amended to clarify that the CNN Creators video on AI had received 17,000 views on YouTube specifically, that CNN Creators videos had received more views across other social media platforms, and that CNN Academies exist worldwide.
