CNN Suxxx

It occurs to me that if CNN hadn't been going for what appears to be a play on the children's series "Where's Waldo?" perhaps they would have avoided this whole thing by formally referring to the terrorist by his last name, which is the habit of most professional journamalisters. But instead they went for the kooky gag in covering the quite serious story about America's Most Wanted. Seems to be a theme.

It also reminds me of something else about which I've been meaning to complain, which is CNN.com's addition of "Story Highlights" at the top of each story—a box with three bullet points (give or take one) that summarizes the story. Here's how President Ford's funeral coverage has been highlighted:


Not only does it irritate me that CNN is making "not reading the news" easier on people, and confound me from a marketing standpoint as "news" is, quite literally, their middle name, but the way in which they're doing it has the capacity to offend even the most basic intellectual competency. The summaries themselves are presented as though to suggest: "Here's the news for the slack-jawed moron on the go!" Even the entertainment stories get the highlighting treatment:



You've got to be kidding me.
Seriously, if you need bullet points to get you through a story on Julia Roberts being pregnant again, maybe reading an entire news story now and again isn't the worst thing you could do for yourself.

The thing that's most amusing about the "Story Highlights" to me is that one of the oft-grumbled complaints of the MSM about the blogosphere is that we pajama-clad stinkpits do nothing of any intrinsic value—all we do is boil down news stories and tack on the worthless opinion of a non-expert poopyhead boo hoo hoo moany whinge and pout. So I guess the new idea, since discrediting us isn't working, is to do us one better and just bullet point stories into nothingness, proving once again they have no idea what function blogs actually serve.