NotSoHotlanta

Poor, poor Hala Gorani. It’s just not fair what they’ve done to her.

Just think about it: born in Seattle to Syrian parents, raised in Paris, fluent in English, French and Arabic, she’s worked for La Voix du Nord, Agence France-Presse and France 3 in Paris, Bloomberg Television in London, and then joined CNN, who relocated her to Atlanta. Atlanta? Why is it necessary to broadcast Your World Today, only one hour of which is even seen in the US, from Atlanta, of all places? Why not London, where they used to do the show, or Hong Kong, or if it had to be from the States, New York or Washington? Gorani still does Inside the Middle East every month. How much longer does it take to get to Damascus or Beirut from Atlanta than it does from London?

Sure, I get it. CNN was founded in Atlanta, by Ted Turner, Mr. Atlanta himself, and is still “based” in Atlanta, even though all of their main anchors and analysts (the names they count on to bring in ratings to rival Faux) are in NY and DC. But why is it still based in Atlanta? Sentimental value? Of course they could run the company from anywhere with a satellite uplink, but that’s not the point. The major news outlets broadcast from the major cities, and Atlanta isn’t one of them, not from a global perspective. CNN has been there since 1980, and they hosted the Olympic games, but when somebody in Armenia is asked to name some “international” cities, Atlanta isn’t going to make the list.

Ever watch the weather on CNN? They’ll run a crawl of a list of global cities, so you can see the weather in Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Nairobi, Sydney, Berlin, Tehran, New York, Mumbai, Tokyo… and Atlanta. If the crawl happens to run through the A’s, Atlanta’s going to be on it. So if I decide to go on that tour of Coca-Cola’s headquarters, I’ll know whether to bring an umbrella. Thanks for being so considerate, CNN.

Look, just about every provincial city wants to be looked at as a big deal. Here in Boston, we like to think of ourselves as the academic capital of the world. Maybe we are, but we’re also a city of about 700,000, and we’re only about 400 km from New York City (die heißeste Stadt). It would be silly to compare us with them. New York is an international city. Boston isn’t. I’m OK with that. I grew up there, and I chose to live here.

I remember when our beloved feetsball team (who haven’t actually been based in Boston since the early 1970s, by the way) very nearly moved to Hartford Connecticut (now there’s a global kinda town). Some guy wrote an impassioned letter to the Boston Globe stating that Boston couldn’t consider itself an international city if it didn’t even have an NFL team. Yeah, that’s the yardstick for an international city. And now that I think of it, Atlanta has itself one of those, doesn’t it?

OK, I take it back.