The Middle East conflict has raised a number of interesting questions for pundits, but in the midst of the media frenzy a bit of underhandedness has gone largely unnoticed… In the last couple of years, the cable news wars have increasingly been won by Fox News, leading MSNBC and CNN to proffer their own half-hearted imitations of the news giant. In the case of MSNBC, the strategy didn’t so much work as it helped slow the massive hemorrhaging at the network. CNN, on the other hand, endured the scorn of its peers as its pandering flashy graphics and logos revealed their Fox News fetish and damaged the cable news pioneers’ long held international gravitas. Still floundering last year, CNN made an attempt to regain some stature by changing the source of their copying from Fox News to the weekly TV hit series “24” starring Keifer Sutherland. Anyone familiar with “24” instantly caught all the reference points when CNN debuted “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. The “24” homage continued with the introduction of “Anderson Cooper 360.” But just as viewers were beginning to forget that CNN now looked like the set of Fox’s highest rated television drama, CNN switched the target of their tracing paper yet again. As the Middle East conflict came into focus a few weeks ago as a true news “event,” CNN suddenly began to look and sound a lot like…the BBC! While reprehensible in deed, in fact, the move makes a lot of sense. Ted Turner’s original vision for CNN was modeled largely on the path paved by the BBC—a global news network that focused (intelligently) on international events. But over the years, in the wake of competition, CNN has lost much of the authority it gained since its start in 1980. Attempting to regain that position by copying the BBC’s 2D graphic style, reserved British-accented anchors and elaborate charts and graphs is (evil) genius. Most Americans have never seen a BBC news broadcast, so the wholesale cloning will go almost entirely unnoticed. CNN’s BBC clone experiment began on CNN International and, once the sexiness was confirmed, was quickly rolled out onto the main U.S. network. There is a BBC America channel, but American media/cable moguls knew better than to make it too easy to watch the BBC, and so the channel is largely hard to find on U.S. cable TV. Now, with the new and improved CNN, we’ll get to see if American viewers respond to the BBC clone, or if the British really are more media savvy than us hotdog and cheeseburger loving Yankees… 

Speaking of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch conducted a rare, and revealing, interview with Charlie Rose last week. Among the revelations: he would support John McCain over Hillary Clinton; he tried unsuccessfully to stop his son Lachlan from quitting the company; unlike Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, he has no plans to give away most of his fortune; John Malone owns 18 percent of his company, and he wants it back; now officially an American citizen, he considers himself more American than Australian or British.