For years CNN has been one of my go-to sources for the news. It’s always conveniently on in the background as I start or end my day, or just anytime nothing better is on television. It has become part of my routine. But lately CNN has become silly.
The morning news on CNN consists of a small team of people with even smaller personalities reading 15 to 20 seconds of a news story, giving very little information about an event before moving on to the next story.
They give these bite-sized news stories not so they will have time to cover more stories. Instead they just loop the same stories over and over again.
I can understand to a degree, they’re trying to spit the stories out fast for people who are just listening while they get ready for work. But if that was entirely true then why would they create so many fillers with their canned banter and irrelevant commentary?
Their attempts to be clever inbetween news stories also gives cause for annoyance. I once heard the morning team cover a story about how female infanticide in China is now resulting in women being raped and kidnapped due to there being a larger male than female population.
Jim Clancy’s introduction of this tragic story was: “Well China’s booming, but there’s one thing there’s not enough of. Guess what? Women.” His transition from this story to the next was: “There may be a shortage of women in China, but there’s no shortage of awards shows out there on your TV screen. There’s going to be another one now.” Hala Gorani went on to introduce a story about how the band The Police planned to reunite at an awards show. The transcript can be seen at:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/31/ywt.01.html.
I bring this up because I can’t fathom why CNN so often finds it necessary to attempt to create a light-hearted buffers between stories. In this case I found it distasteful and it took away from their story about women’s issues in China. I suppose they think just reporting news stories is too depressing or boring. Perhaps that’s why they appear to be systematically dumbing-down public discourse on important issues.
I could also do without CNN’s compulsion to constantly advertise itself even in the middle of reporting a story. The sheer frequency in which Wolf Blitzer says, “best political team on television,” sounds all too similar to the way in which I was forced to stuff cheesy taglines into phone calls when I worked in various call centers. Wolf Blitzer is an intelligent and accomplished man and I think he should be above that.
I’m picking on CNN because I’m familiar with it. What little exposure I’ve had with MSNBC and the Fox News Channel hasn’t exactly inspired devotion in me either. For now it seems I’m going to have to settle with the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/) and The Associated Press (http://www.ap.org/).
What news shows do you find to be reliable and informative? A fellow student would like to know.