Although it’s becoming less and less clear to me exactly why I am doing this, I still jump over to CNN.com several times a day to see what’s happening (or what they think, in their now tragically questionable judgment, is worth identifying as “happening”). Probably because it’s the first item in the predefined News bookmark menu in Safari, which (again, for reasons I can no longer understand) I have left unaltered in my bookmarks bar.
I think things may have finally gone too far today though. When I got to the page I was greeted with this giant “Breaking News” banner:
![](http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/cnn_breaking_news.png "CNN\'s definition of \\"breaking news\\""){kind=small}
Wow. Really? Lame Duck Bush giving a rousing endorsement to his party’s nominee? No friggin’ way! Please. How about “Breaking News: We’re Totally Irrelevant!” There you go. Now that’s a news flash. (For themselves, at least.)
Comments
5 responses to “Attention, CNN: this is not “Breaking News””
No, Scott, see… this IS breaking news… News about the RNC “breaks” my soul into a thousand tiny shards.
And the St. Paul Police Department was prepared to “break” my kneecaps if I had gone over there and participated in the protests.
Heloooo! Good job, you hit the nail on the head once again!
Maybe the problem is just that you need to read between the lines. The real news in that headline was that the Republican Party wants so badly to distance itself from the disastrous Bush administration that they didn’t even invite him to speak in person at the convention… and that he wasn’t even speaking live when he did appear via the Jumbotron.
That seems right, actually. Now that CNN allows comments and links to blogs, they’re really trying to make the news more puzzle-based.