American Morning on CNN – Wasted Airspace

I was at the gym this morning and noticed a couple of disturbing things on the television. Next to the TV tuned to MTV which seems to play the same 3 videos every morning that I’m on the treadmill, hospital there was one tuned to CNN. I’m starting to wonder if that middle “N” means news anymore.

About 8 this morning, they spent around five minutes talking about McDonalds coffee and doing a blind test test in the studio and with passers by on the street. Is this newsworthy? I guess I now know that people can’t really tell one coffee from another. (If you’re read gladwell, you also know about the effectiveness of blind test tests). I would like to know how much McDonalds was paying for this infomercial segment, and if they aren’t paying, then why CNN is wasting time covering this crap. I’m sure we can find some more topics to talk about, like the anti-free speech crackdown in Kenya. People would probably have been better served by a video of a waving flag.

In the dreaded crawl during this time I notice this (paraphrasing a little because I didn’t have a notebook with me on the treadmill) “Women from 50 countries sign letter to Kofi Annan accusing him of paying lip service to gender equality and doing nothing to promote women’s rights” – Which is completely redundant. That’s what lip service means! You don’t need to add on the “and did nothing” part.

What’s next, defining all the words in the crawl to make sure people understand what’s going on?