CNN

In election news back home CNN was the preferred channel. (Get past the overrated Wolf Blitzer.) The "Best Political Team on TV" with Anderson Cooper beat MSNBC and Fox.

Living in this country we get very little CNN and mostly it is CNN International. This is a shift from A league to C league. I have tried and tried to watch but the programming can't match the quality of Channel 2 back home. (For those non-Cedar Rapidians reading, that's an insult.)

Nevertheless I looked forward to the tour of CNN complex in Atlanta. Unfortunately I have no pictures because cameras were not allowed. We went through a security process that rivals any airport. We then went up an escalator that took more than two minutes to get to the top of eight stories and learned that it's the longest escalator in the world (very believable).

We had a chance to see the CNN news floor live and in action. It was interesting to see the cameras facing the anchors. I remember seeing teleprompters from a visit to Channel 9 when I was in elementary. Basically the anchors read from a screen below the camera. Today's teleprompters project an image to a plate of glass in front of the camera. The anchor staring right at the words appears to you and me to be looking right into the camera. When they are doing an interview they are looking into the camera seeing exactly what we see.

We moved onto the CNN Headline News where we watched workers play solitaire. We learned that Headline News has no "new" news generation, it's all recycled news from the regular CNN.

That explains a lot.

We then saw CNN International. We heard nice words about how CNN has more international bureaus than any other organization but the woman giving the tour didn't stop for a second for me to ask, "So why is the coverage so lame?"

Anyhow, I'm glad I took the tour. According to Matt, whose been on the tour 3 times now, it is a much better tour than it was in the past.

Overall, I'd say CNN was pretentious. The tour struck me as claiming that they were the end all of news. Sorry. I don't watch CNN anymore and I'm able to keep informed.