Dave Winer posted this thought about TV news this morning. I hadn't been aware that there had been a "real" news program on TV over the last 20 years or so. But it's evidently gone the way of producers' quests for ratings. My fitness routine over the winter after soccer season for several years was a Nordic Track and CNN Headline News. That program now has the requisite guy/girl pairing and "happy talk" chatter rather than just the news. Even NPR ditched Bob Edwards and went to the guy/girl format on radio. That's all I want. That's also why 90% of my news comes through my RSS news aggregator.
 Last night I tuned into Aaron Brown on CNN, as I try to do every night at 10PM Eastern. It used to be the last remaining real news report on CNN, but at some point this year, I think, they changed the format to be like all the others. One sensational story, last night it was a jail break and a murder in Tennessee, in May it was a runaway bride in Georgia, and spend the whole hour with pictures and interviews wondering how such an apparently normal person can snap and hurt a few random people in some random place. But people run away every day, many murders happen every day, at the same time there's a stock market, weather, international politics, sports, and by the way, we're at war. All this is relegated to brief summaries from another reporter, usually an attractive young woman, who Brown, who is a real newsman, or was, sort-of flirts with, even though we know he's married and has at least one child, a daughter, who's now a teenager. CNN used to be about news, and when that changed, it had one last bastion of news, and now that's gone. No one seems to be talking about this. [Scripting News]
8:55:33 AM 
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