Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Fake News Event of the Day

CNN's programming is really pretty weird. I generally don't catch any of the morning show, but between that and the Situation Room it seems that every day is dominated by some fake news event - a school lockdown, a missing child, a truck accident, a workplace shooting - with a brief hour of television from another planet when they broadcast CNN International at noon.

It isn't that these stories aren't news at all, but they're local news stories. They're broadcast only because there's some sort of voyeuristic lure in them. This was brought home to me when the fake news story of the day was an armored car heist in Philadelphia. People were killed and it was certainly a valid local news story, but there was absolutely nothing about the story to make it have any national relevance at all.