Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Everybody Want a Piece of Me

Yesterday I was watching CNN cover a recent medical breakthrough. The story was about researchers getting a lab-grown rat heart to beat independent of a body. It is a significant breakthrough for the replacement of ailing human organs. Lower rates of organ rejections etc. Quite interesting stuff, the thing that really got my panties in the bunch was the way CNN chose to cover this story.

For the duration of the broadcast the screen was split in three ways. The bottom of the screen had the usual scrolling information and the other half was devoted to another news story. I think that splitting the screens to allow more information to be dispersed is fine. But the scrolling feature and the more dominant news screen was devoted to live footage and up to the second scrolling updates about Britney Spears being "hours late to her child custody hearing." The volume of the Britney story far exceeded the volume of the much more interesting (in my oppinion and hopefully yours) scientific breakthrough story.

Are you kidding me CNN? I hope you got your ratings boost, because you just lost a viewer. Is it our fault? Do we as a people hold these two issues in the same light? I could care less whether or not BS is running late to her own funeral. I thought it to be in very poor taste, and nearly immoral to broadcast these stories together. CNN gets two thumbs down from The Last Unicorn and hopefully many other people. Don't get me wrong, I like reality television just as much as the next gal, BUT their is a time and a place.

I suppose I'll stick to BBC.com and NPR.org for my news.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of this!

Also, that latest comment on my blog was a gross act of flattery, my dear. The only way to deal with such a thing is to begin messaging you every time I go to the bathroom, to instill in you a more accurate sense of my mundaneness.

Fire in the hole!

The Last Unicorn said...

Yeah, that's pretty unacceptable! We're totally a war economy ... blah! Mundane is okay, you can still be super cool!