CNN: News Porn

I've been meaning to write about how CNN (and CNN.com especially) for a while, but this story about a kitten taken surfing pushed my last button. It's a nice and benign enough story in it's own right, and who doesn't love kittens? Especially wet and clearly unhappy kittens taken on a weird stunt that was oddly filmed on high quality equipment (whether commercial or public, I don't know, but this clearly wasn't some guy with his cell phone filming this). But when we just had giant primaries (covered above), a war in Iraq (no stories), at least three prominent African disintegrations (no stories), Pakistan spiraling dangerously (nothing), global warming (silence), more comments from the director of national intelligence and the director of the CIA about waterboarding (*crickets*) and CNN wants to talk to us about Heath Ledger (who apparently was consuming a personal pharmacy) and surfing cats, there is no better way to frame CNN than as news porn. The most trusted name is journalism has become a tabloid. They even have articles on why bad kissers don't get action (shocker!).

For years now, it's been my personal metric that at any given time, CNN.com will have around 10 prominent stories as their headline links. Of these links, 3-5 will be entertainment related or titillating. At time of writing: Ledger's autopsy; Holloway's dad being pissed about a disrespectful laugh (I consider myself a news junky and I had to google this one); an article about Conan, Stewart and Colbert's antics during the writer's strike; a defendant hitting their lawyer in court; and the stupid surfing cat. Any death is tragic, but this type of coverage from an ostensibly serious "paper" of record is just shameful.

But, in their defense, they're only responding to what people click on and read. Looking at the lists of "most read" articles on CNN or Newsweek (#1: 6 Gym Health Hazards) or Time and you'll almost always see 2-3 of the top 5 places taken by the same ilk. Funny/amusing stories make reading the paper fun, rather than just reading about tragedy after tragedy, but they need to be justified with thoughtful, legitimate journalism if one wants to treated more seriously than gossip rags or blogs. The people are saying what they want, and one can't really fault the media for giving them what they want. But one can fault them for pandering, and for not striving to elevate the public discourse. UNHAPPY SURFING CATS ARE NOT NEWS!!! ahem.