Before the indelible Ted Turner sold his gargantuan news organization to Time Warner, CNN absorbed many of the tycoon’s insufferable traits. These include the planet-sized ego, and an incredulous tendency for breeding a cumbersome model of fake news. Also, on the insidious menu of Turner’s idiosyncrasies is the pestering practice to overuse character graphics in swaying the audience, which left a detrimental legacy on the entire television news industry. Like a swarm of pixilated gnats, the visual annoyances mar the screen in the deliberate and incorrigible act of misleading the audience.
Two decades tardy to the party with a percentage of leadership still caught within the dinosaur Carboniferous era of 1980’s “if it bleeds, it leads” Martini lunches, the retina burning “Breaking News” graphics are finally being retired. The practice of constantly flashing the blatantly intrusive graphics into the frontal cortex of the average viewer, ten hours after the actual incident was first reported, will at least be retired from the CNN brand to Venezuela senior center. However, the periphery of local affiliates bordering the abyss will continue to bombard the audience with the empty graphics, as hyperlocal news clings to paltry ratings as the entire hierarchy has become yet another victim to social media and diminishing advertising revenue.
While desensitizing viewers over the course of three decades by instructing individuals how to react, the “breaking news” banner not only played a hand in societal engineering, but in many cases created hysteria over content that in reality was relatively neutral to the majority of the audience. Critics and mass media researchers claim that the practice is a ploy to bolster ratings in fabricating an emotional response to news that in a vacuum of neutral. According to a number of sources, CNN CEO Chris Licht announced to staff members in an internal company memo that the controversial phrase may have reached its shelf life and the media corporation may be weighing other options that are not so mind numbing. “Something I have heard from both people inside and outside the organization is complaints we overuse the ‘Breaking News’ banner. I agree,” stated Chris Licht, “It has become such a fixture on every channel and network that its impact has become lost on the audience.”
Licht, who was promoted to the head of the controversial media conglomerate earlier this year inherited a self-driving vehicle battery fire toxic plume of smoke, as ratings bottomed out in February, plummeting nearly 70% in key demographics after the corporation fired headliner Chris Cuomo. The polarizing personality’s prompt termination after it was made public of his affair with a co-worker led to the axing of CEO Jeff Zucker. Under Zucker’s checkered leadership, the network went from a haven for suburban dog moms as prolific as a Campbell’s soup can, to employees egregiously staging “breaking news” events with all the subtlety and fantasy portrayed by a Hollywood movie set.
While “breaking news” is simply just one of the many over the top phrases bombarding the viewer in a fear-mongering phishing scheme that buries any semblance of objectivity beneath a superficial candy land layer of the reactionary in defying substance. The variety of statements that incite the entire emotional spectrum cannot hide the fact that in the end, the news channel represents an unpatriotic element in undermining fundamental freedoms and the concept of a republic.
Licht’s proclamation that CNN will tone its ceaselessly busy screen down a notch still does not alleviate the bias factor that afflicts the network. In the absence of sending viewers subliminal messages, the liberal news organization is at its roots still at war with the First and Second Amendments, and the truth in general. How Ted Turner’s legacy tags itself as a bastion for journalism still employs the likes of Jim Acosta or Don Lemon, is an insult to the Kronkites and Murrows of the world who did their best to hold sensationalism in check.
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This editorial powered by law-abiding Americans anticipating the positive results of the midterm elections.
