“Authentic” War Reporting

Nostalgia as Ideology: Deconstructing the Bourgeois Romance of “Authentic” War Reporting

Brent Sadler’s lament for CNN’s “lost soul” is a masterclass in false consciousness. Writing from his position as a former senior correspondent, Sadler constructs a nostalgic narrative that obscures the material reality of what CNN always was: an instrument of capitalist media production serving hegemonic interests under the guise of “independent journalism.”[^1]

The Myth of the Heroic Individual Reporter

Sadler’s opening is revealing: “cruise missiles skimming low over Baghdad during the Gulf War, the air vibrating, my voice raised above the roar.” This romantic self-positioning—the brave reporter narrating American military violence in real-time—epitomizes bourgeois individualism. The focus is on his voice, his presence, his authenticity, while completely eliding the imperial violence being enacted below those cruise missiles.

This is not journalism as witness to power but journalism as embedded accomplice. The Gulf War coverage Sadler nostalgically recalls was, in Chomskyan terms, a textbook case of manufacturing consent. CNN provided the visual spectacle that normalized American military intervention, transforming the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure and the killing of civilians into entertainment—”chaotic, loud, gloriously alive.” The network didn’t challenge power; it amplified it, packaging imperialism as heroic narrative.

The claim that reporters “didn’t measure risk in ratings or clicks” is historically false. CNN pioneered 24-hour news precisely because it identified a market opportunity. Ted Turner was not a journalistic idealist but a capitalist entrepreneur who recognized that continuous news coverage could attract sustained viewership and advertising revenue. The “maverick approach” Sadler celebrates was simply a different profit model, one that temporarily aligned risk-taking with audience growth.

The Dialectic of Corporate Consolidation

Sadler correctly identifies that “the accountants moved in” and that “absorption by media conglomerates led to a slow suffocation by corporate interests.” Yet he frames this as a betrayal of some original pure vision rather than as the inevitable trajectory of capital concentration. This is ahistorical and ideologically convenient.

Media consolidation is not an aberration but the logical endpoint of capitalist competition. Smaller enterprises are absorbed by larger ones; profit margins are squeezed through cost-cutting; labor is deskilled and controlled through bureaucratic management. What Sadler experienced as CNN becoming “safe, polished, soulless” was simply the network maturing from entrepreneurial capitalism into monopoly capitalism.

The closure of bureaus and reduction of overseas assignments represents capital’s rational response to declining profitability. Foreign reporting generates minimal return on investment compared to studio-based punditry and conflict-driven domestic coverage. Sadler’s complaint amounts to: “Capitalism stopped funding the expensive things I enjoyed doing.” The solution he implies—returning to the Turner era—is impossible because the material conditions that enabled that model no longer exist.

Zucker and the Trump Spectacle: Capital Recognizing Itself

The discussion of Jeff Zucker is where Sadler’s analysis becomes most instructive, though not in ways he intends. Zucker “understood television: tension, theater, pace” and “knew how to build a spectacle.” Sadler criticizes this as “mistaking performance for purpose,” but this presumes journalism ever had a purpose separate from performance under capitalism.

Zucker’s genius was recognizing that Trump was the perfect commodity for the cable news business model. Having produced “The Apprentice,” Zucker understood Trump as a pre-packaged ratings generator. The “mutual dependency” Sadler identifies—”President Trump’s chaos for CNN’s coverage”—was not a “corrosive bargain” but a clarifying moment. It revealed the actual function of corporate news media: not to inform or hold power accountable, but to generate engagement that can be monetized through advertising.

The $1.6 billion CNN earned in 2017 is not evidence of journalistic failure but of capitalist success. The network functioned exactly as designed: maximizing surplus value through attention capture. Sadler’s moral outrage—”a marketplace where anger equals engagement”—is misplaced. That is the marketplace. That has always been the marketplace. The only difference is that Trump made the transaction nakedly visible.

What Sadler cannot admit is that the “authentic” journalism he pines for was equally complicit in serving power, just in less obvious ways. The measured, “objective” reporting of the Gulf War served American imperial interests more effectively than explicit propaganda precisely because it appeared independent. Zucker’s error was not abandoning journalistic integrity but making the capitalist logic too transparent.

The International Franchise: Neocolonial Capital Flows

Sadler’s discussion of CNN’s international licensing operation inadvertently provides a perfect case study in how media capital operates globally. His experience building N1 Television in Serbia “to cut through a media landscape already gripped by state capture” reveals profound contradictions.

First, Sadler positions himself as bringing “independent journalism” to Serbia, implying that Western media models are inherently superior to local ones. This is classic cultural imperialism—the assumption that American journalistic practices represent universal standards rather than particular ideological formations suited to American capitalist democracy.

Second, the licensing model he describes—”CNN exercised no editorial oversight and accepted no accountability”—is neocolonial extraction in its purest form. CNN sells its brand credibility (accumulated through decades of perceived legitimacy in core capitalist nations) to peripheral markets, collects licensing fees, and accepts zero responsibility for how that brand is deployed. When N1 Television faces accusations of serving as propaganda, CNN points to local owners. When those local owners face pressure from authoritarian governments, CNN remains silent to protect revenue streams.

This is precisely how transnational capital operates: extracting value from peripheral economies while externalizing all risk and social cost. The example of CNN Turk “bending under President Erdogan’s pressure” while CNN maintained the license “because the revenues were too good to lose” proves that corporate media will always prioritize profit over principle. Sadler presents this as hypocrisy, but it’s simply capitalism functioning normally.

The claim that CNN “built its empire on trust and then outsourced its name to partners who were not trustworthy” mistakes cause for effect. CNN built its empire on capital accumulation. Trust was a byproduct—useful insofar as it facilitated that accumulation. When trust becomes expensive to maintain and licensing revenue can be extracted without it, the rational capitalist choice is obvious.

The Contradiction of Demanding Accountability Under Capitalism

Sadler writes: “CNN maintains that accountability exists and that editorial standards are in place… Yet accountability to oneself is the most fragile kind and one that CNN routinely rejects as an acceptable metric in any other situation.” This is perhaps the essay’s most telling moment of cognitive dissonance.

Sadler recognizes that self-regulation is inadequate, yet he can only imagine solutions within the existing capitalist framework. He wants CNN to have better internal standards, more principled leadership, stronger editorial oversight. What he cannot envision is structural transformation: worker control of newsrooms, democratic governance of media institutions, public funding divorced from advertising revenue, or community ownership of broadcasting infrastructure.

The problem is not that CNN lacks accountability mechanisms but that any accountability mechanisms under capitalist ownership will necessarily be subordinated to profit imperatives. Editors can confer and exercise judgment all they want, but when Warner Bros. Discovery treats CNN as “any other underperforming asset: priced, trimmed and ready for sale,” editorial judgment becomes irrelevant. The determining factor is always capital’s need for returns.

The False Hope of Consolidation Critique

Sadler’s warning about the potential CBS-CNN merger—”regulators may call it ‘consolidation.’ It’s really compression: the slow, silent replacement of editorial judgment with financial prerogatives”—again identifies the symptom while missing the disease. Media consolidation doesn’t replace editorial judgment with financial prerogatives; it reveals that editorial judgment was always already constrained by financial prerogatives.

The romantic notion that journalism represents “a covenant between those who report and write and those who rely on them” is bourgeois mystification. Under capitalism, journalism is a commodity relation: content is produced by workers whose labor is alienated and appropriated by owners, then sold to audiences whose attention is commodified and sold to advertisers. Any “covenant” exists only insofar as it facilitates this circuit of capital.

Sadler concludes: “journalism isn’t a scalable asset. It’s a covenant… Break that, and you don’t just lose a network; you lose its heartbeat.” But journalism under capitalism must be treated as a scalable asset because all production under capitalism must be rationalized, standardized, and made maximally profitable. The covenant Sadler invokes never existed except as ideology—a useful fiction that obscured the material relations of media production.

The Reactionary Nostalgia for “Simpler Times”

What makes Sadler’s essay particularly insidious is its deployment of nostalgia as a form of reactionary politics. By constructing a golden age of authentic journalism (the Turner era, the Gulf War, the brave correspondent speaking truth), he creates a narrative of decline that locates the problem in recent decisions rather than systemic structures.

This nostalgia serves to naturalize capitalism while critiquing its contemporary manifestations. It suggests that if we could just return to earlier practices—more foreign bureaus, less corporate interference, principled leadership—journalism could be redeemed. This forecloses any radical critique of media ownership itself.

The reality is that the “golden age” Sadler recalls was golden only for certain journalists in certain positions reporting on certain topics in ways that aligned with hegemonic interests. For those being bombed by the cruise missiles Sadler so vividly describes, CNN’s coverage was not “authentic journalism” but propaganda justifying their destruction.

Class Analysis of the Journalistic Labor Process

What’s entirely absent from Sadler’s account is any class consciousness regarding journalists as workers. He speaks from the perspective of a senior correspondent and bureau chief—essentially management—with no solidarity toward the precarious journalists, stringers, fixers, translators, and production staff whose labor made his dramatic stand-ups possible.

The deskilling and proletarianization of journalistic labor—reporters transformed into content producers measured by metrics, working on contract without benefits, subject to algorithmic management—is barely acknowledged. Sadler mourns the loss of “chaotic” freedom for elite correspondents without considering that such freedom was built on hierarchical labor relations that exploited others.

A genuine Marxist analysis would examine how technology and capital restructuring have transformed the journalistic labor process, deskilling craft workers and intensifying extraction of surplus value. It would build solidarity between journalists and other media workers—camera operators, editors, technicians—recognizing their common interest against capital.

The Necessity of Socializing Media Production

Sadler ends with a plea: “I can only hope it remembers that journalism isn’t a scalable asset.” But hope under capitalism is a weak reed. The only solution to the contradictions Sadler identifies is the socialization of media production itself.

This means:

• Democratic ownership: Media institutions controlled by workers and communities, not shareholders
• Public funding: Revenue streams divorced from advertising and corporate sponsorship
• Transparency: Open decision-making processes subject to public accountability
• Labor solidarity: Journalists organized collectively to resist capitalist discipline
• Internationalism: Solidarity between media workers globally, rejecting neocolonial models

CNN’s crisis is not about lost souls or broken covenants. It’s about the fundamental contradiction between journalism as a public good and journalism as a profit-generating commodity. That contradiction cannot be resolved through better leadership or nostalgic returns to imagined pasts. It requires revolutionary transformation of ownership relations.

Sadler’s essay, for all its apparent critique, ultimately serves bourgeois ideology by channeling legitimate anger about media degradation into reformist dead-ends. A truly radical analysis must reject both the nostalgia for corporate media’s “golden age” and the fantasy that capitalism can produce genuine journalistic independence. Only by transcending capitalist relations of production entirely can we create media that serves human needs rather than capital accumulation.

The question is not whether CNN has lost its soul. The question is whether we will continue to mystify capitalist media as having souls to lose, or whether we will finally recognize them for what they are: institutions of class power that must be dismantled and rebuilt under democratic control.