CNNNN

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CNNNN (Chaser NoN-Stop News Network) was an Australian television show, satirising American news channels CNN and Fox News. It was produced and hosted by the same team that publishes The Chaser newspaper.

CNNNN's slogan was "We Report, You Believe.", a parody of Fox News' slogan ("We Report, You Decide.").

The program was presented as a live feed from a fictional 24-hour news channel, anchored by Craig Reucassel and Chris Taylor. Each episode had a theme which carried through the episode, examples (from the DVD) included:

• Lunchgate: A businessman accidentally leaves his lunch at home and is pursued by police and the media in an O. J. Simpson style chase and becomes a suspected terrorist.
• Cadman for PM: CNNNN beats up a comment by minor Australian politician Alan Cadman as a leadership challenge against Prime Minister John Howard.
• Shush For Bush: US President George W. Bush is visiting Australia for 20 hours, and is believed to want to sleep the entire visit. CNNNN exhorts Australia to be quiet so the President can sleep properly.
• Animal Farm: The Chaser "reality show" Animal Farm is a send-up of Big Brother. CNNNN covers the controversy when one of the contestants dies.
• Packer Health Crisis: Live updates on the health of (now late) Australian billionaire Kerry Packer.
• Tilt Australia: CNNNN aims to reduce to the water-shortage crisis in inland Australia by tilting the entire continent to drain the water from the Eastern seaboard. Radio announcer Alan Jones was duped by the Chaser team live on air for believing this concept.

The roles of other members of the Chaser team included:

• Charles Firth: played a hard-hitting reporter with highly-controversial opinions presented in a segment called The Firth Factor. The character could be interpreted as a parody of Bill O'Reilly, who hosts a program on Fox News Channel called the O'Reilly Factor.
• Andrew Hansen was the leader of the CNNNN "house band", which would play musical commentary for some stories.
• Julian Morrow: CNNNN's US correspondent. Morrow would appear on a television as if he was overseas, although he did actually conduct a number of vox pops in the USA to highlight American ignorance of Australia, other countries and international affairs in general.
• Chas Licciardello: hosted Lameass, a parody of MTV's Jackass, with really lame and pathetic stunts.
• Chris Taylor: anchored on the news desk with Craig Reucassel.
• Dominic Knight: former weatherman, now a reporter.

Other regular features of the program included:

• A newsbar, which proved so popular it was made available on the CNNNN website.
• Advertisements for Fungry's, a multinational fast food outlet with a yellow cow mascot (slogan: "I'm fungry!" - "Fungry" is Australian slang, derived from "fucking hungry").
• Advertisements for Boggs Lager, an irresponsible beer company which promoted heavy drinking (slogan: "[Let's all] Get Boggered tonight!").
• Advertisements for Esteem cosmetics, whose vague advertising parodied the deliberately confusing manner in which cosmetics are marketed (slogan: "Esteem - because you need it").

The team created the television special The Election Chaser for the 2001 federal election. Following on from that, they broadcast two seasons of CNNNN, in 2002 and 2003, at nine and ten episodes, respectively.

A DVD featuring several episodes of the series was released in November 2004.

In 2004, Craig Reucassel and Chris Taylor took over as hosts of Triple J's drive programme. They took a six week break, coinciding with the federal election campaign, to rejoin the Chaser crew to produce a short ABC series, The Chaser Decides.

In September 2005, Chaser News Alerts started running on the ABC's digital TV station ABC2, shown every Thursday night at 7.55pm. Chaser News Alerts are also shown on the ABC's Broadband website. The Chaser's new show, The Chaser's War on Everything, premiered on February 17, 2006, featuring similarly topical comedy to CNNNN.

See also

• The Chaser (newspaper)
• List of Australian television series
• List of Australian Broadcasting Corporation programs
• The Daily Show, satirical "fake news" program in the United States

External links

• [CNNNN Official Website]
• [CNNNN: A profile of the world's most respected news channel]
• [The Chaser Website]

 

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