CNN Blows It: Rehnquist Dies, Larry Gabs
I came home from a football game Saturday night and flipped on the news, as I’ve been doing a lot this week in the wake of what CNN calls Killer Hurricane Katrina!
CNN has been my first news choice for a long time. Fox News Channel is unacceptable, not because it’s biased but because it’s so bad. But I admit that I’ve been surfing around a bit during this story, because each network only has so much material that it then endlessly recycles.
But to my horror, CNN was showing a rerun of a Very Special Episode of Larry King Live wherein celebrities tell you how important it is — and it is, don’t get me wrong — for you to donate money to hurricane relief efforts. I rolled my eyes as always, because I find Larry King unwatchable even under the best of circumstances. He and his phone callers get in the way of real news. And this was a rerun of a pre-taped show!
So I turned over to MSNBC, where I discovered a banner headline that read: CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST DEAD. Blink. Turned to Fox News: REHNQUIST DIES. Wow. Big news. Back to CNN: Larry King talking to Sela Ward about how she used to live in New Orleans. Oh my.
Worse yet, CNN’s ubiquitous “headline crawl” — installed after 9/11 on all the major news channels, yet filled not with breaking news but with trivial junk — was filled with, you got it, trivial junk. Tomorrow’s forecast high in Boston. A story about a bingo champion. Promotions for upcoming CNN programming.
And nothing, absolutely nothing, about the Chief Justice of the United States, the leader of the Judicial Branch, kicking the bucket.
I mean, I’ve been dissatisfied with CNN before, but never like this. MSNBC woke up anchor Brian Williams at home and put him on the telephone — silly as that was — to cover the event. Fox News called up Alan Dershowitz, who used impeccable timing to accuse Rehnquist of being an “activist judge” and a possible racist — way to show your class by pisssing on the warm body, Alan — before he was shouted down by Fox’s conservative monkeys.
I enjoy CNN sometimes, I really do. Aaron Brown is my favorite news anchor right now, and the only TV news I watch regularly is his NewsNight program. But… clearly there’s nobody home at CNN right now. Should the poor producer who was at the controls of CNN late on a Saturday night in the middle of a three-day-weekend be fired for missing the major story in order to keep Larry King’s rerun on the air?
Of course not. But the person who positioned that person in the heart of “America’s Most Trusted News Source” or “America’s Hurricane News Leader” or whatever they’re calling themselves now… that person should be frog-marched out of the building immediately.