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raza syed is twenty-four. he lives in s.f. 2000-2002 |
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CNN is crap.
Certainly not an original observation, and it's a theme I've visited before -- but since I don't watch the network very often I was assaulted anew by this realization today during a bout of afternoon passivity. And I'm not even talking about the insidious editorializing, the sensationalism, the frequent factual errata -- those are yesterday's umbrages. I'm referring to the knock-off sitcom-patois anchor banter, the strangely bored reportage, the lame ad-libbing. Especially the lame ad-libbing. There was this segment: about how McDonald's French subsidiary has replaced homicidal harlequin Ronald with Asterix the Gaul in an attempt to pander to the culturally hypersensitive locals; about how the locals predictably have their cravates in a knot over this; and the anchor kept inserting "le burger" into her monologue, to dubious grammatical effect, and it just wasn't necessary or funny or even sane. Lame. Later, a rather Steve Carell-looking Jason Schwartzman was on, live, to plug the foreseeably execrable Slackers; and toward the end of a very disjointed interview he leaned toward his interrogator and began massaging her left shoulder. "You have a lot of tension," he intoned duskily. (Earlier, she had blurted out that he had a lot of chest hair.) The CNN liaison just looked really, really uncomfortable. A witty retort was not hers. There was also a piece about the recent addition of Connie Chung to the CNN family, following her protracted and inglorious stints at all three major television networks. During a press conference she professed that it had always been her dream to work for an all-news channel, as if she used to keep a calendar of CNN on her wall during her primetime news magazine days, like Pablo the Penguin sitting in his little igloo, pining for sunnier climes. (Actually, the way Chung confessed her "dream," all craven gravitas, reminded me of that scene from Welcome To the Dollhouse where the little girl comes to Heather Matarazzo's school to give a cautionary speech about talking to to strangers, as if engaging in such illicit conduct is akin to a drug addiction that will land you on Skid Row leashed to a pimp. "I am here to talk to you today about the dangers of talking to strangers, for I, Mary Ellen Moriarty, once talked to strangers, and that is how I became the innocent victim of a brutal kidnapping." You get the idea.) In an act of devious misdirection, CNN sidebarred a few other additions to its roster. My peripheral vision just barely caught the names of MTV's Serena Altschul and The Mole's Anderson Cooper scrolling by as Connie crossed and uncrossed her legs on the dais. And let's not forget the harvesting of NYPD Blue's Andrea Thompson last year. I think these facts speak for themselves. Pretty soon even the supposedly venerable likes of 60 Minutes and 20/20 will have run out of respectable senior citizens to prop up in front of the cameras, at which point they'll begin plundering the ranks of beauty pageant contestants, music VJs and television gameshow hosts in earnest. Bank on it. And here's a tip: I hear the huskies from Snow Dogs are looking to branch out. And isn't Matt LeBlanc out of a job this fall?
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