re:The audience
When CNN lets people express their opinions either through e-mails or vocally, they add that those viewpoints are not CNN's.
It's thanks to CNN that 24h global news exists as they pioneered it and it's also thanks to CNN that I have many vidoes of Space missions, sometimes hours of them (sts49, sts61, sts71, sts95, Mars Pathfinder, etc...) , sometimes only minutes.
A great thing about CNN is their use of international journalists, not just americans and it doesn't have as strong a self-righteousness flavor others have.
Raoul