When did CNN Headline News become retarded?

[SwordoftheVistula]

I used to watch CNN Headline News some years back. It was hard news all the time, basically an ongoing coverage of major news headlines from the day, highlights from the Iraq War, Congressional acts, and so on.

I saw it for the first time in years this week at my new job, because it's the only channel that plays, and is in all the break rooms. It's now like the TV news channel in 'Idiocracy', only worse. It's just shrill people screaming about stuff that isn't even major news. In the past 4 days, at different times throughout the afternoon, evening, and night, I have seen different shrill personalities literally hyperventilating over the same two stories (a missing persons case in Michigan and a rape/murder in one of the Carolinas), aside from brief interludes of celebrity gossip (again the same couple stories day after day, Kim Kardashian used her debit card to do something unseemly, and a Kate somebody with a bunch of hispanic looking kids has had a couple of them kicked out of school).

I leave and come back 3 hours later, and it's the exact same shit, as if I never left, only (I think) a different host/anchor/whatever. I leave and come back the next day, still the same exact shit.

Even the news channel in Idiocracy at least covered real news. This channel is now just retarded news for retarded people.

WTF

[Breedingvariety]

They are putting TVs everywhere now. I think it's an accident.

[Psychonaut]

It's not just HLN either. It'd be really interesting to chart out when then shift occurred from cable news being information into it being infotainment.

[Loki]

Agreed Sword, it put me off CNN a long time ago. Channels like RT seem way more factual on relevant news items.

[Fintorah]

Agreed Sword, it put me off CNN a long time ago. Channels like RT seem way more factual on relevant news items.

RT News/Al Jazeera are my two favorite newz sources .

Al Jazeera seems to be the only channel that covers events that would, in a European context, seem catastrophic... such as the mass burning of Christian churches in Muslim countries like Indonesia. Even if a news outlet inherently has an agenda, it should at least have humility, something CNN seems to be lacking or in denial of.

[Electronic God-Man]

It's not just HLN either. It'd be really interesting to chart out when then shift occurred from cable news being information into it being infotainment.

Are they trying to keep up with things like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report?

[Loki]

I think they're catering for the domestic audience. The international edition is better.

[Eldritch]

I think they're catering for the domestic audience. The international edition is better.

If I may expand the topic a bit into serious, at least fairly unbiased news sources in general, BBC World at least used to be good. I haven't really watched it for about a year now though. Deutsche Welle's English news are usually top notch.

[Austin]

CNN is dying in the U.S. to the two ideological news channels MSNBC and FOX.

This has happened thanks to the internet and the reality that the average person now gets their news from the internet as they are typing in something on a browser or search engine. The only people left watching political-news TV stations are the partisans. Evidently partisans have clearly shown ratings-wise that they much prefer to watch their ideological sides station rather than a bland-generalization station such as CNN. Hence the decline of CNN.

[Wölfin]

I didn't know Fauxnews was doing well.