24 hour cable news?

This is NOT a political post!

I've been spending a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms recently, and as a result, I've been trying to ignore a TON of cable news. I'm not even going into the shameless partisanship of Fox News and MSNBC here, since I usually request that they be turned off if I find them active. No, it's CNN that has gotten my goat. Now I haven't watched any of the news channels since the beginning of the CURRENT Gulf War [with the exception of national election nights, of course], so I wasn't prepared for the total lack of news coverage by CNN.

Here's what I saw instead of what was going on in the world:

1. Constant self-indulgent "aren't we so up-to-date" references to social networking and [god help us all] Twitter, in the guise of talking about the Iranian election. In a 60 minute segment, supposedly on the election, all the "experts" interviewed were "communications experts" talking not about the election or the repression that followed it, but about how it has been reported via cellular communications and social networking sites. It's as if the guy who reported the Hindenburg explosion had said, "Oh this is amazing! Live radio coverage with movie news reel photography. Oh, the news is right in our laps now. Oh, the humanity."
---- side bar, they did have a crawl, and the crawl contained two interesting bits which they never stopped raving about Facebook long enough to follow up on: (1) Oil prices continue to drop, AND (2) Gasoline prices continue to rise. Gee, Lois, certainly there's a story there.

2. Suddenly the Iranian election disappeared entirely because Michael Jackson died. All those people in Iran Twittering and Facebooking stopped being the story. Instead, 24-hour news meant 23:45 about Michael Jackson, 00:10 about Farrah Fawcett, and 00:05 about Ed McMahon. The House and Senate are debating energy options and health care. There's a coup in Honduras. And TWO Republican office holders confess to having sex with WOMEN, but CNN is interviewing people who stood outside the courthouse at Jackson's molestation trial 150 years ago, because THAT is what's important.

And where's the respect for Billy Mays?

I have a shocking idea for CNN. Go back to the original CNN headline news concept. Let's have 48 half-hour news programs a day with live broadcasters. Let's have a TBS guy come in with a sports report once an hour, let's do a national weather outlook once an hour, and every two hours or so, let's find our good friend Elsa Klensch to tell us we're not dressing ourselves stylishly. And let's NEVER have a segment where in-studio "experts" analyze and give opinions.

I used to check the old 'CNN2' two or three times during the day to get updates on world situations. Thanks primarily to CNN, I now ignore the TV altogether for news and rely on the Internet -- unless, of course, I'm stuck in a waiting room.

Okay, NOW I'm going to decaf.