Monday, December 13, 2010

How far has CNN fallen?

Deborah Potter muses about how far CNN has fallen, and her short essay in the American Journalism Review online offers some sobering thoughts about how American news media is approaching news.

"Whatever happened to the CNN where the news once mattered?" she wonders aloud. It's something that the rest of us have also wondered as we watch 24-hour "news" channels fill prime time with opinion. As a certified news junky, I don't know how many evenings I've just given up -- driven to YouTube to find video of news (this happened yesterday when I wanted to see video of the dome collapsing in Minneapolis).

Potters looks at the CNN personnel for its evening lineup and finds them all wanting, at least one of them ethically challenged, and the only real newsperson among them, Anderson Cooper, planning a daytime syndicated talk show when Oprah Winfrey retires.

She closes with longing: "When I worked there briefly in the early '90s, the mantra ' news is the star' didn't seem laughable in prime time. Sadly, it does now."

No comments: