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Comment by jasonlbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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