watching cnn is even worse. the headlines are ridiculous. when someone was killed by a KILLER WHALE they dedicated an hour to it. Segment name? Killer whale KILLS .
On the cnn.com frontpage, they used to append " | Watch it now!" to the end of headlines for any articles with video. I would read CNN daily just for the hilarious mashups. E.g., "Arizona family of four slaughtered by Havalinas | Watch it now!" or "Serial sex offender strikes again | Watch it now!" etc. But I guess somebody finally caught on and made the appropriate changes.
The tweets are the worst. They read tweets way too often, and the anchors clearly have never seen the tweets before because they stumble over every abbreviation, misspelling, etc. And the tweets almost never present an interesting opinion. It's just a stupid gimmick to make people feel "engaged" and "part of the program" which theoretically improves ratings (I say theoretically because I change the channel whenever they bring the tweets up) at the expense of any semblance of quality.
While CNN is abysmal most of the time, I do have to question the site's use of the Chinese media as a comparison point.
I like the idea of criticizing our media, but let's not allow superficial headline pages determine that an outlet is good.
Sure, China Daily might have a headline about a bombing in Afghanistan while CNN is reporting on American Idol, but China's media is terrible on so many fundamental levels.
This is cool, but i don't see how this is relevant to HN. There are tons of social news websites for people who just wants fun websites to check out, and I tend to think of HN as something a bit more productive and technical/startup oriented.
Picture as proof: http://i42.tinypic.com/znu3gw.jpg
They also have someone behind the scenes that reads tech news or something and tries to make them seem hip by reporting the linkbait stuff.
I only see it on the tvs on the treadmills at the gym. It's actually effective since it infuriates me so much, I run faster.