AJR  Columns :     TOP OF THE REVIEW    
From AJR,   November 1993

They Came Out With Their Hands Up   

As the world watched Moscow on CNN, three networks abandoned the field.

By Reese Cleghorn
Reese Cleghorn is former president of AJR and former dean of the College of Journalism of the University of Maryland.     


For the first time in history, people all over the world watched for two days as the now-halting, now-rushing events of an armed rebellion tore at the heart of a great country with bullets and blood, suspense and fear, powerful pauses of confusion and doubt, with the fateful outcome unknown.

We watched as a sunny fall day in Moscow turned into a nightmare.

We saw the push of the crowds in the street, the rout of police flailing their truncheons and losing their shields, a would-be Lenin proclaiming revolution from a balcony, explosions as renegades attacked the television center, a copter sweeping down into the Kremlin like some off-stage intruder but bringing the president back from his dacha , a TV journalist telling the story as the center was shot up, the troops rolling in, the tanks grinding up to the Parliament.

We heard the silences. We watched as a tank took aim, and we waited. We saw and heard as artillery broke open the white shell of the Parliament. Hundreds of people, we knew, hid behind these walls, their fates uncertain.

We watched as black billowed out, until some clouds turned saffron and red, and we wondered then about the fire inside.

CNN brought this to the world, hour after hour, for two days.

Let this be recorded as the moment when, even before Boris Yeltsin's enemies capitulated, three networks known in the past for worldwide news coverage capitulated to CNN. They might as well have come out with their hands up.

CNN had 50 people in Moscow. It gave great stretches of air time to the events there that Sunday and Monday, October 3 and 4. It did the live, play-by-play newscast. Others just told us, once in a while, how the game on the other network was going.

This is what ABC, CBS and NBC did, apart from their regular newscasts:

ABC: 16 minutes in three special reports during the morning and afternoon of October 3; 16 minutes during four special reports on October 4.

NBC: eight minutes in two special reports on October 3; 36 minutes in six special reports on October 4.

CBS: 16 minutes in seven special reports on the morning and afternoon of October 3; four minutes in two special reports on October 4.

Imagine this. Although NBC recovered some on October 4, earlier it had devoted a total of eight minutes to special reports, on a day when anti-Yeltsin protesters rallied for their attack, marched on the Parliament, overran police lines, grew into a larger mob and forced the police to flee – the day when the rebel president, surrounded by bodyguards, came out to call for insurrection and attacks on the mayor's office and the television center.

What, interrupt the Chiefs vs. the Raiders, or give up revenue from commercials?

We knew the non-cable networks had ceased to staff major capitals with experts and, for the most part, had retreated to a distance. Let London protect us.

They had given up their weapons. But this orderly retreat now has turned into a rout, as surely as the police were routed in Moscow.

Some of us watched, fascinated, transfixed, as a great drama played out on the world stage, for the first time in history.

We were there. l

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