CNN International has doubled its staff in West Asia including Iraq (northern Iraq and Baghdad), Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and Israel to provide a live coverage of the ongoing US-Iraq war.
The news schedule would be would be presented from CNN's main production centres in Atlanta, London and Hong Kong together with round-the-clock anchoring from the CNN broadcasting facility in Kuwait, a company statement said.
It added that the international coverage will reflect the political, financial and human impacts of the unfolding events in the middle east from a global perspective and is intended for viewers around the world.
"We have doubled our staff and the number of bureaux since 1991. Today, we are an international operation rather than a US network broadcasting internationally, which brings with it many additional responsibilities as well as opportunities to tell the story from numerous perspectives for people around the world," Ian Macintosh, senior vice president, CNN International (Asia Pacific) said in the statement.
Since 1991, CNN has developed from three TV broadcast outlets including headline news, CNN and CNN International into a truly multimedia brand.
The CNN brand comprises more than 30 multiplatform services of TV, radio and the web in nine different languages with more than 200 international affiliates.
Macintosh, however, refused to quantify the amount that would be spent to cover the war by saying that one cannot budget precisely for a war when one doesn't know how long it will last. The talk has been doing the rounds that CNN has pumped $30 million in bringing the war coverage live.
CNN currently has over 150 staff deployed across the middle east. Some CNN correspondents reporting from the middle east include Nic Robertson and Rym Brahimi in Baghdad, plus Christiane Amanpour, Jim Clancy and John Vause, Sanjay Gupta, Brent Sadler, Jane Arraf, Ben Wedeman and Alessio Vinci.
