June 21, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
CNN’s decision to include more information in its broadcasts about charities and disaster-relief efforts has drawn praise, but also raised some questions from bloggers who focus on the news media.
This week, the Associated Press reported that the network said it would direct viewers to nonprofit groups involved in some of their stories and establish a Web site to tell viewers how to support the organizations.
David Kronke, a media critic and self-appointed “mayor of television,” praised the idea on his blog, calling it a “rare moment of clarity amidst the drivel.”
“For example, during Hurricane Katrina, between shots of Anderson Cooper’s smackdown of Mary Landrieu there would’ve also been information on how to donate to help those stranded,” he writes.
But Richard Potts of the Washington Journalism Center, a nonprofit group in the nation’s capitol, says that CNN’s move “raises all kinds of thorny issues. For example, which causes and charities will CNN give its de facto approval to and which ones will it not?”
On the center’s blog he writes that CNN will probably ignore small groups. “This is also certain to exacerbate existing inequalities of resources between cause celebres and more grass-roots efforts that labor invisibly. This is because CNN is more likely to find out about causes that are already well known, or worse yet, report on causes simply because one or another celebrity has adopted that cause,” he writes.
What do nonprofit leaders think? Will CNN’s efforts benefit charities? Or will it only help the well-established ones?
