April 12, 2005

Do we really care? Must be a slow news day. I can't help to notice that CNN is becoming more like "Access Hollywood" or "Inside Edition". Perhaps it was This that started their desent?
posted by Bobsled 19 years ago
  • 404'd!
  • 3 links to the same story here. (not the "ooh, aah, blogs!" post, obviously)
  • I almost never read news pages on the interweb, unless I'm led to it. On TV though, CNN may have slid, but I only watch in the morning, and they are so much better than the advertainment at CBS, NBC and ABC. I catch BBC World for the half an hour we get and used to check out the International Channel for Deutsche Welle (those guys wear AWESOME ties--a foot wide it seems sometimes). So yeah, CNN is light news, but whaddya want--they've all been bollocked.
  • Sorry about the link
  • Not only has CNN slid, but I've also noticed that the once-trusty BBC News online has started to follow along the lines of the American news sites more so in the past year. What frightens me to a certain degree are the numerous friends I have around the world that actually depend on news coverage from CNN's website!
  • I actually think Shrub's music list is worth discussing, but I'd bet it'd be the mirror thread of the "kill your TV" one. i.e. "Music choice doesn't mean a damned thing!" "Yes it does!" "Nuh uh!" etc.
  • Music choice doesn't mean a damned thing!
  • beezlbubba, thanks for admitting your admiration of DW-TV's ties. those men are dapper!
  • Yes it does!
  • Music has the right to children.
  • Nuh uh!
  • Yes, CNN sucks now. No, blogs didn't make CNN suck. It's probably something as simple as them running the stories that generate the best ratings/most money, which unfortunately means they run a lot of what is, IMO, crap. Perhaps, news-oriented and political blogs offer an alternative which makes some people notice the lower quality of the more traditional news sources. Suck, crap, and lower quality are all subjective. If CNN gets more viewers running stories that I think suck, then obviously someone thinks they're good.
  • Hmmm, Bush and I both like George Jones. The funny thing is that Bush comes off cooler than the guy from Rolling Stone, who still thinks the Sex Pistols are the epitome of cool and dangerous. Granted it's hard to be less cool than a guy from Rolling Stone at this point.
  • smallish bear: Too true. It's all about the money, ratings, and number of eyeballs they pull, not about covering the important issues and adhering to any sort of journalistic integrity. CNN's slide is a direct result of the AOL-TW merger and FOX News' increasing dominance in the television and online news arenas. Unfortunately, instead of sticking to their guns - and making a better product - CNN has sunk to the level of the tabloid, sideshow, nationalistic feel-good garbage that is the hallmark of FOX "News". Between the AOL-TW merger trying to reinvent CNN's networks as "hip" for younger viewers (just witness the train wreck that is CNN Headline News these days) and any lack of mature direction at the highest eschelons of CNN, the whole company has ended up turning into a sad little caricature of FOX. And I don't notice it simply because a lot of blogs offer better news - I've watched CNN TV and CNN.com's precipitous slide since around 2001, and it's been nothing but disheartening. Not merely because they're playing much harder to the right - to pull some of FOX's marketshare - but because the whole network is just limp. Pitiful. There's no fire left.
  • Since Ted Turner's official departure from the network a couple of years ago, CNN has been like an orphaned child forced into prostitution. Pitiful.
  • If you analysed my iPod (I have a mini! I love it!), you would probably think I was late seventeenth century/early eighteenth century (500 MB of Vivaldi) post-communist (Leningrad Cowboys, Red Elvises) from either the Ozarks or Cape Breton (Bluegrass and Folk) who refuses to grow up (200+ MB of Sesame Street, Muppets and Fraggle Rock songs). That's not even counting the Europop, which clearly shows me to be a cheese eating surrender monkey - though it's Moldavian cheese. Then again, you might be right.
  • My other question - why doesn't he just rip his CD collection?
  • Oh - forgot the klezmer-rock fusion - thanks, new guy!
  • I've been noticing how hard it is to get any news in my news lately. I don't care about celebrity news, I don't *care* about the never ending coverage of the latest media circus (ok, I care a little bit, but only in a train wreck way), I don't *care* about the feel good warm puppy story of the day. I want to know what's going on around the world. Now I'm mostly sticking to the Sunday Morning political shows (goooo, Russert!), but even those get bogged down in talking head stupidity.
  • meredithea- I think your best bet would be to take appropriate news RSS feeds from what you consider to be respectable news sources, put them in an aggregator like bloglines and just scan headlines. It's not perfect, but at least when the media circus story of the week is the top headline in your nation news feed, it's just a headline and a 2 line summary instead of a giant picture of michael jackson's head on the front page of your newspaper. And the "real" news is just underneath that instead of hiding between ads on page 6.
  • Music choice doesn't mean a damned thing Except in an exceptionally pure PR sense. This could have been a complete nightmare for his handlers. I can picture the shudder of horror they went through when they realized someone was inevitably going to ask for his iPod contents. Imagine the damage to Bush's PR if it turned out he listened to Pat Boone 24/7, or worse, Elton John! Also on the iPod is the 1979 song "My Sharona" by the Knack, about a man pursuing a much younger woman This might be a bit too much analysis. I had absolutely no idea what My Sharona was about, and I've sung along numerous times (the chorus, at least). "No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles." They might have played it a bit too safe here. This list is so boring and conformist that I want to dislike it out of principle.
  • It's payola. The same thing that's killing radio. What you hear as "news" is actually paid for by someone with an agenda. Said one lemming to another, do you hear the ocean?
  • They ran this exact story on ABC World News. I sent them the nasty e-mail I possibly could without cursing. The media is absolutely pathetic. Horribly, horribly pathetic.
  • It's intentionally released PR. Each song was selected after forethought. This is why there's only 250. My Sharona was selected to try and give him some universal appeal. Fogerty was selected to make him look forgiving. "mostly country" was selected to reinforce kinship among his fanbase.
  • CNN has sucked for awhile, now. I blame Bush. I recommend watching Canada's The National. It's fantastic. I still feel like I can trust what is being said on Canadian news programs.
  • I had absolutely no idea what My Sharona was about Yeah, that's exactly what it's about.
  • Good idea, smallish bear. I've been meaning to do that for a while, now, but what with the laziness and the dissertation, I haven't gotten 'round to it.
  • You guys missed the memo. CNN sucks when there's no war on, and Americans have decided that we won the war in Iraq. Better hope OJ kills again, CNN...