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CNN: Cranium Numbing Network |
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Tuesday, 29 July 2003 |
The other day I felt a little out of touch and switched on CNN. I swore I wouldn't start a "Let me tell you what's wrong with the world" blog, but I can't resist this one. CNN is 100% crap these days.
It's become a bad mixture of Oprah and a portal web page. The Oprah part comes from a never ending stream of experts, reporters, and commentators arguing about what they think they thought happened and what they think might happen. The portal portion comes from the confusing stream of tickers that flow above, beside, and around the current talking head. Even if you tried to make sense out of the talking heads, just when you think you are following the conversation you switch to the tickers in a panic that something important just happened and you're missing the headline.
It's very hard to get useful information out of CNN. There is no journalism to provide filtering, researching, consolidating, summarizing, validating, etc.
So what happened? September 11th, I think. On that day, speculation was all that was available and headlines were breaking continuously (I remember trying to get to news.yahoo.com again and again and when I finally got the page to load only getting a one sentence news report). CNN is still reporting September 11th style, but that style is only appropriate in the most urgent and uncertain of situations.
CNN is just playing the ratings game I suppose. This style of TV creates a sense of fascination and urgency in the viewer. It looks like something important is going on, even if it isn't. The viewer is pulled into wondering what will happen next, that keeps them watching and keeps the money rolling into CNN.
I think it's time to drop CNN from the channel display on my satellite receiver.
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