WTF, CNN? | Hacker News Reader

WTF, CNN?

wtfcnn.com

58 pointsakkartik24 comments

watching cnn is even worse. the headlines are ridiculous. when someone was killed by a KILLER WHALE they dedicated an hour to it. Segment name? Killer whale KILLS .

Picture as proof: http://i42.tinypic.com/znu3gw.jpg

They also have someone behind the scenes that reads tech news or something and tries to make them seem hip by reporting the linkbait stuff.

I only see it on the tvs on the treadmills at the gym. It's actually effective since it infuriates me so much, I run faster.

On the cnn.com frontpage, they used to append " | Watch it now!" to the end of headlines for any articles with video. I would read CNN daily just for the hilarious mashups. E.g., "Arizona family of four slaughtered by Havalinas | Watch it now!" or "Serial sex offender strikes again | Watch it now!" etc. But I guess somebody finally caught on and made the appropriate changes.

(Not actual headlines, but you get the idea.)

That’s what happens when you have to fill 24 hours with news. The format just doesn’t make any sense.

But CNN-International also has to fill 24 hours and is much much better.

The format does make sense. Let someone like Arianna Huffington or the Memeorandum people curate CNN.

You're saying that there's not enough interesting stuff going on in the world to fill up 24 hours?

Interesting for whom? TV is linear, that works great for short summaries of the most important news of the day, not so great for everything else.

Not interesting enough to your average American cable viewer, no.

especially considering all they could do with the empty time. remember the news hour? does a show like that exist anymore?

The tweets are the worst. They read tweets way too often, and the anchors clearly have never seen the tweets before because they stumble over every abbreviation, misspelling, etc. And the tweets almost never present an interesting opinion. It's just a stupid gimmick to make people feel "engaged" and "part of the program" which theoretically improves ratings (I say theoretically because I change the channel whenever they bring the tweets up) at the expense of any semblance of quality.

> And the tweets almost never present an interesting opinion.

Could be worse, could be youtube comments.

Now that I think about it, I bet they must have read those at one point too.

Just saw this one:

"Stewart tells Jobs: 'Chill, baby'"

And above it was a picture of Jon Stewart making a dumb face.

This one just defies comprehension. I mean I know what it's talking about because I watched the Daily Show, but otherwise, WTF CNN?

They give the masses what they want; rubbish is much easier to watch than real news.

While CNN is abysmal most of the time, I do have to question the site's use of the Chinese media as a comparison point.

I like the idea of criticizing our media, but let's not allow superficial headline pages determine that an outlet is good.

Sure, China Daily might have a headline about a bombing in Afghanistan while CNN is reporting on American Idol, but China's media is terrible on so many fundamental levels.

Deleted comment

There's a drop-down on the divider that allows you to choose to which foreign media CNN should compare.

Doesn't seem so bad to me... http://i.imgur.com/W7NIR.png

Maybe it's working :)

This is cool, but i don't see how this is relevant to HN. There are tons of social news websites for people who just wants fun websites to check out, and I tend to think of HN as something a bit more productive and technical/startup oriented.

Real slick visuals at work there. Kudos.

You thought CNN was a serious news outlet?

I'm not sure what to say to that other than...

sorry?

I wonder - will this site get shut down like google^4.com did?

Not significantly different, but interesting.

its the chicken mcnuggets of news

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