Last June, CNN business reporter Richard Quest interviewed the CEO of the state-owned Qatar Airways about the recently opened Hamad International Airport in Doha. “Opening new airports and terminals is a tricky business,” Quest warned, before introducing Akbar al Bakar, who supervised the airport’s construction.

But, he continued, “When Hamad opened in the last month, things went remarkably smoothly.” The segment suggests that this outcome is largely attributable to what Quest calls “the Chief’s [Bakar’s] eye for detail.” We watch the fastidious al Bakar patrol the airport, caressing walls and saying things like, “Look at the detail here, the match between the plaster and stone” and, “You can see the quality, you can see the touches, you can see the detail, and we will not compromise.”

This wasn’t Quest’s first homage to the Chief and his airport. In a January 2012 segment on the airport for the CNN International program Future Cities, Quest observed that, “No detail is too trivial for the man known simply as ‘Chief.’” Al Bakar predicted with certainty that the airport would open by the end of that year. This prediction changed dramatically in yet another interview, in January 2013—when his original prediction date had already come and gone. This time, al Bakar gave himself plenty of wiggle room, assuring Quest that the airport would be ready for the 2022 World Cup.

Quest never mentioned the failure of al Bakar’s first prediction. More to the point, over the course of three interviews, the CNN journalist did not address a multitude of important background facts—about the airport as well as about his and his employer’s relationship to it. For instance, he never told viewers that Qatar Airways would be sponsoring special CNN coverage of the history of commercial flight in conjunction with an annual aviation conference, and that Quest would lead the special programming. Nor did Quest disclose that his own relationship with Qatar Airways stretches back to at least 2005, when the airline sponsored his CNN show Quest. That year, he also served as emcee at the “Reach Out to Asia” fundraising drive, initiated by Qatar Airways and the Qatar Foundation, another state-owned firm which has a large (and clearly marked) advertising feature on CNN’s website and which sponsored the CNN International program, Inside the Middle East, until this week.

Most significantly, Quest failed to ask al Bakar about allegations of labor abuse at the airport construction site. In 2012, Human Rights Watch reported that workers said that they had been deceived about their salaries and that their passports had been confiscated, as is the norm under the kafala system of migrant labor, which binds workers to individual employers. And, despite Quest’s assertion that things went “remarkably smoothly,” the airport opened six years late and exceeded its budget by $12 billion. When it did finally open in April, it was amid a legal dispute with Lindner Depa Interiors, the interior-design company presumably responsible for the “quality” and “detail” that al Bakar had so effusively praised.

Quest’s avoidance of grim context in these interviews was not an anomaly. CNN International, the version of CNN that broadcasts outside of the US and operates independently, has an ongoing history of sponsorship ties to an array of entities from the Gulf region, notably Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, most of which are wholly or partly owned by the state and, by extension, the countries’ ruling families. (Furthermore, earlier this year, Time Warner, which owns CNN, sold its headquarters in New York City to a group that included a sovereign wealth fund of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi for $1.3 billion.)

CNN International generally fails to disclose its relationships to these entities, except on the shows, segments, and Web pages that they sponsor. And even there, there is little explanation of the sponsorships. Perhaps worst of all, the network misleads its audience about the nature of the editorial content the sponsorships accompany—which is often extraordinarily favorable to the firms themselves, their partners, or the domestic economies in which they operate. What appears to be news on CNN International is sometimes not supposed to be news.

Christopher Massie is an intern at CJR.