THE WORTHLESSNESS OF CNN
Last night my wife Barbara wanted to watch Obama’s comedy routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The schedule said the president was to speak about 9 PM. So we tuned in around 8:30. Of course all of this was Pacific Coast time, so somewhere in the mess grown out of the CNN created by Ted Turner, there ought to have been time to edit or replace empty airtime with some sort of content. Isn’t CNN as a supposedly world network, covering something beside the lost Malaysian airplane?
Whatever is happening at CNN, Don Lemon and a crew of inane talking heads spent an hour and a half of meaningless blather apparently covering the part of the correspondents’ dinner before the President got to do his own routine. There was exciting talk about whether Lemon’s bow tie matched the fabric on Michelle’s dress and repeated, painful speculation of what the panel would have to discuss if THEY had been seated next to anyone important. Perhaps the worst of this was over half an hour with Ben Stein, while the former Fox Favorite talked about his no longer being relevant enough to be invited to the dinner.
Eventually, I got Barb to switch to C-SPAN. Without Don and Friends, the public service followed the program being broadcast. It was easy enough to switch from folks accepting awards for journalism, while we waited for the point in the program where the president would deliver his pre-scripted jokes.
Meantime, I have titled this essay “Nigeria and CNN.” Of late CNN has reached a nadir of respect with its absurd coverage of the
missing Malaysian airplane. Despite the disrespect this has earned CNN as a source of real news, apparently the ratings on the soap opera treatment of the search are quite good.
This sort of phony news has killed what was once intended to be a world news channel. At least Fox news has funny talkers that are so weird they are easy to make fun of.
While Don Lemon and his panel were discussing bowties, I was wondering whether I could get my wife to switch to channel 125, the local channel for Al Jazeera. At least there we might have been able to listen to news and discussion of the 223 young girls abducted into slavery by the Boko Haram Muslim extremists in Nigeria. Or we might have had interviews with experts knowledgeable about events in Ukraine.