The first time I really lost faith in the news was during the Oslo Peace Accord Talks, when CNN hosted a debate between a Palestinian and Israeli spokesperson.

The first time I really lost faith in the news was during the Oslo Peace Accord Talks, when CNN hosted a debate between a Palestinian and Israeli spokesperson. It seemed to me that it was quite a delicate political situation, and that simply reporting on it while leaving the top politicians to discuss would be better, but CNN really wanted a live TV debate about it. Well, it turned out that they'd specifically chosen polar opposites to discuss with one another. Now, since I've been working in media, I know the attendants weren't an accident. They are always carefully chosen. So if CNN really wanted to help the peace talks (they did after all speak highly of it), they would have invited other people, but I gather that would also have made for more "boring" TV. Obviously it was very "entertaining" to watch these two debaters have at each other, but it quickly turned so bad that the host had to intervene. During the debate I remember asking myself, "Is the CNN intentionally trying to disrupt the peace talks by inviting these two idiots to debate each other?" CNN's outreach is big and international, so this would be noticed both in Israel and Palestine. While possibly "entertaining" it did absolutely nothing to help the already bad situation. On the one side, you could perhaps claim that it's not in CNN's interest to "help" anyone (actually a certain level of conflict is what keeps most journalists fed), but in this instance they were clearly firing up people in the worst way, and thus disrupting important peace talks.