Thursday, June 25, 2015

CNN and a JukeBox Which Has No Good Songs

There was an interesting story about Obama slapping down someone arrogant enough to try to heckle him in the White House.  His response to it was good but there was no way to read the article on CNN because a video with Wolf Blitzer talking about the matter was followed by a non-interruptible commercial which was much louder than the previous commentary.  Reading was impossible and continuing was pointless.

And so Marshall McCluhan's idea 'the medium is the message' has come to its unfortunate peak in which the medium prevents the message.

Note:  I realize that's what McCluhan was saying originally but this is far past the distortions he was seeing when he was writing so long ago.


This one gets chalked up to the same greed as most of the other problems of the current age.  CNN is trying to force really demanding commercial videos on you and these are at least as intrusive and annoying as the ones which drove you away from television in the first place.  The most annoying thing about them is there is no way to stop them ... save one:  exit the CNN web site.

At one time CNN was my primary source of news but the quality has fallen so far that it's in roughly the same category of low-quality parody as Fox News.


The biggest problems in it:

1)  It's always faster to read content than to listen to Wolf Blitzer or any other journo rambling and trying to be dramatic about it.  There is no personal aspect to this as he's just another hack journo in an online news world which crawls with them ... but ... he wastes my time in video.  Amazingly enough, I came to the article to discover what's in it and that doesn't mean I have any interest in whether Wolf Blitzer has his beard well-trimmed.

2)  The commercials CNN runs are louder, longer, and, worst of all, are impossible to interrupt without closing the page.  This kind of greed may be sufficient to kill the site altogether as the only relief from the way CNN presents news is to go to a better site.  Perhaps CNN thinks that won't happen but The Guardian is my immediate jump every time CNN pisses me off and Russia Today is for when I want high-quality, well-researched news.

The Guardian typically has a higher proportion than RT of batcrap news from journos of Jessica Valenti's ilk.  Example:  Tight jeans are bad for you but I will wear them anyway.  In English that means Jessica tells us she has a great-looking backside.  What she doesn't realize is her articles are not interesting enough to make me care about her backside.  Wiggling yer ass only gets the simple ones, girly.

(Ed:  Abby Martin has an outstanding backside)

Yah and she is one scary smart female as well as I'm betting otherwise you never would have looked, matey.

3)  CNN is distorting news through its omissions.  Jill Stein declared her candidacy for President of the United States two days ago.  I know you didn't see mention of it on CNN as the story was not covered.  It almost certainly wasn't covered on Fox News as Jill Stein represents The Green Party in America and the absence of even an attempt at fair coverage shows well how far democracy has fallen.

Ironically, Jill Stein is easily the sexiest candidate on the 2016 Presidential Tour.  Some may dismiss that thought due to her grey hair but take a look at her eyes.  I don't mean anything even remotely facetious in the statement.


But most of all it's those infinitely-annoying CNN videos.  That news site has become so irritating you could use it to torture war criminals.

And maybe that's it as we're all complicit to what happens in the Middle East so that makes all of us co-conspirators to war crime and thus CNN is our punishment for it.  All the while Fox News laughs as if it got a joke no-one else understood.

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