By now — unless you’ve been hiding in your attic — you know of the “Balloon Boy” from Colorado. Yesterday, I received a call from my mother telling me to turn my TV to CNN for some dramatic coverage of the balloon. I obliged. And there it was — video of the family’s experimental balloon gliding to Earth … and CNN’s anchors, well, making it worse.
Night in and night out, I watch Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart mock CNN for its idiotic coverage. Then, I watch the comedian ask more pointed and intelligent questions of his guests than the vast majority of journalists. But it’s easy to assume that Stewart’s team pulls the worst CNN coverage it can find to poke fun of. But after watching yesterday’s coverage, I am led to believe that they don’t have to work that hard to find poor coverage.
Yesterday, I saw an anchor ask a “hot air balloon expert” why in the world a family would have such a thing. The expert’s response (paraphrased): For fun? Later, I watched CNN’s crack new team analyze a photo of the balloon and an indecipherable black speck. By zooming in and out on their touch screen, they repeatedly told viewers that the photo doesn’t show much … except a black speck that may or not be the boy falling from the craft, that may or may not be … anything. But they were pretty sure it WASN’T a smudge on the lens. Thank goodness for CNN.
Actually, the more I watched, the more convinced I was that it may be time to say farewell to 24-hour TV news. The coverage is not better — in fact, it may be worse. It does nothing to deepen our understanding of our world. So, sure, let’s keep Headline News on a loop … Rotate through the top stories every 30 or 60 minutes so that you can watch the news according to your own schedule. But let’s seriously re-think the value of around-the-clock news channels.