Oh CNN. Just when I think you might actually be making strides towards competency again, you have to go and fuck it all up in the space of about an hour- which is fairly impressive, even by your standards. (Does anyone else remember when CNN used to mean something? Back in the day, a half hour of CNN would actually leaved you informed as to the events of the day. There might have been some fairly thoughtful, cogent analysis included in there as well and you'd have a halfway decent idea of what was going on in the world as well. Oh, those were the days...)
For the record- I stand by what I said yesterday. I didn't think CNN did a horrible job on Monday. We had CNN on for the full eight hour shift I worked that day and from what I could tell, they were restrained, they weren't talking out their asses and although there was some speculation it didn't descend to the mindless circle jerk orgy of speculation that we saw in the wake of the Sandy Hook Massacre (most of what was reported that day turned out to be completely wrong.) Monday was, I thought, a mildly competent day for CNN and given their ratings and their descent into mediocrity that's currently ongoing, I felt good for them.
Then, came yesterday. (I'll let Jon Stewart do the full skewering, here.) Basically, CNN was told that an arrest had been made in the Boston case. And then they were told that no such thing had apparently happened and spent the rest of the afternoon sowing mass confusion amongst the media as to what the fuck was going on. That brief shining moment of endearing competency was replaced by a shitstorm of incompetency and it just turned into, well, I'm not sure what it was, but it sure as hell wasn't competent news.
It's becoming an increasing problem in the age of Twitter and social media for news networks to get a handle on just what the hell is going on during situations like this. I'm not sure what other networks are like but CNN seems to have developed an unfortunate tendency to read something on Twitter, assume it's true and then just blurt it out onto the air. (They were especially bad during the Egyptian Revolution.) You can wave your hands around and tell us that 'this hasn't been confirmed' but what you're really saying to people is 'we're talking out of our asses, here, can't you tell?' People can tell. Just look at CNN's ratings. While I understand that in the age of mass media, you're going to want to get the story before anybody else does, blurting shit out without actually taking the time to verify anything will get you into trouble every. single. time.
My high school journalism teacher used to tell us that the last reporter to get absolute truth from a source was Moses. But today, the emphasis seems to be on crafting a narrative before you even have credible, verified facts to craft it with. It's not news, whatever it is- it's crisis porn, plain and simple and there's only so much you can watch before you cease to get useful information out of it.
Don't get me wrong: after something horrible like Boston our initial instinct is to want to find the bastards and get 'em- right now, not later and I can't really fault CNN for buying into that. But the situation on the ground contained plenty of other stories- from the runners that kept running to give blood, to Peter Sagal from NPR who was actually running the Marathon as a guide for a legally blind friend of his (there's a fantastic column on Runner's World but it appears to be lodged behind a Paywall.)- all things which were happning right then and right there all of which contained plenty of facts that were totally true and verifiable. (There were also plenty of Facebook charity scams that popped up right away not to mention the stories of the people of Boston who helped out marathon runners who were stranded by the incident.) Instead of fixating and speculating on what you don't know, how about reporting what you do?
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