Question Mark?

So since I forgot my article on my flashdrive at home (>_>) I might as well make fun of news sources. Hey, if I can make fun of the way CNN handles the political election, I can make of of just about anything they put on.

So take a look at this headline. This was the first thing I saw when I opened the CNN home page.

First of all, if "breaking news" is now defined as some arbitrary statictic about an upcoming holiday, well, lets just say there's a reason why I don't follow news too much.

Second, there was no actual article, or even any kind of link, that came with this "news." Why is this?, I wonder. Shouldn't there be something I can click on in order to read more about this? But wait! Go back to that picture and look at the lower left corner. I even circled it in red for you: It's an advertisement.

That's right, this so called breaking news is nothing more than a ploy to get reader's attention. I don't know about other people, but it bugs me when something is made into a big deal when it's really not. Especially when there's nothing to back up how big of a deal it is.

There's my rant. And the bell to end the class just rang so the timing couldn't have been more perfect. Yay.

Presidential election coverage sucks.

So like most every other American that knows what an election is, I was keeping tabs on our Presidential election for the year of 2008.

Before I go any farther, I should state that I was a political neutral. My stand on politics, and more specifically on this election, is that the winner was obviously the better candidate, and as long as they don't screw up too badly I had no preference as to who took the office. Not to say I didn't care who won, because obviously it's important, but I wasn't supporting nor attacking either candidate.

Now that I've said that...Like I said, I was keeping tabs on the election results. I had the CNN page up on my computer and the live Associated Press video stream running for a while (before I figured out the CNN stream updated faster and switched to that).

I couldn't help but notice that for most states, the moment the polls would close, it would be declared a victory for Obama. As in, it's 8:01, I'm holding the mouse over CNN's interactive map, over the state of, say, California, and even though the count they had was at zero votes a piece, the state was blue. Same with states like Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and most every other east cost state.

Sometimes I saw an Obama state even though they had McCain ahead in the votes. Maine was a particularly interesting state.





Ok, seriously? First you have Obama winning the state based on three votes. Then you still have Obama winning even though McCain is ahead in votes? I understand if there was a lot of Obama support in a lot of states, but at least wait longer than that before declaring a state a win. Even MSNBC sucked:



So much for patience....