This is NOT Journalism

Over the past year I've been asking myself a question - Has CNN.com always been this depressingly terrible or is this a recent development?  First off, all of their articles are apparently written for third-graders by middle-school students.  Secondly, entertainment "news" takes up a distressing portion of their "Top Stories."  They have also started the annoying habit of giving you the top three or four "Story Highlights" whenever you click on a story.  Apparently if you don't have the time or reading comprehension skills to finish their three paragraphs (which usually add up to like 8 sentences), you can read the PowerPoint version of the story.

Occasionally, when nothing at the New York Times or the Washington Post catches my eye I may become sickly curious about what drivel CNN is broadcasting.  Today, I feel they have reached a new low with the story Review: John Oliver gets laughs out of 'Terrifying Times'.  It's a review of some stand-up comedy performed by a Daily Show "correspondent."  It is also possibly the most poorly-written review I've ever seen.

It starts with the Story Highlights:

• AP: "Daily Show" correspondent John Oliver's "Terrifying Times" hilarious
• Oliver: Wind-farming a bust - "Wind has been horrifically overfarmed"
• Best way to emotionalize news: Score it to power ballads, says Oliver

Seriously.  Someone read the review, determined that if you took nothing else away from this review, you would want to learn those three things.  Let's deconstruct those bullet points:

1. This is a clutch bullet point here.  Someone's been doing their PowerPoint.  Count the facts that you can learn from that: 1) We didn't do independent journalism, but we subscribe to the AP Wire.  2) This is somehow linked to the "Daily Show," that show is popular and will inspire positive feelings in most people.  3) The subject of this article is John Oliver.  4) He has a show/movie/book called "Terrifying Times."  5) The show/movie/book is funny.
2. Oh shit!  We put every single fact into the first bullet.  How about we just take one of his jokes and make it a bullet?  Now, let's rephrase it to take away the timing and comedic value...
3. Well, we already ruined the best punch line in bullet #2, but there's a 3 bullet minimum... did he say anything else funny?

Now that we're past that insult to our intelligence, let's take a look at why it's so insulting that Frazier Moore has a job writing reviews, much less for a national wire service.  The article is just terrible.  It's so bad, I don't think I've made it all the way through yet.  Why not?  I got to the part where it just devolved into quoting Oliver over and over.  Here's the thing, half of stand-up comedy is delivery and timing - a transcript is unlikely to work as well.  So when Moore starts paraphrasing the jokes you can imagine how that affects the quality of the article.

This is not a review of a stand-up routine, this is a summary, and a shitty one at that.  I mean, I edited my high school newspaper.  If someone had brought me this and told me it was their review, I wouldn't have been that surprised.  We were a really small school, the journalism teacher was too burned out from teaching to care, and we took anyone we could get to write anything for the paper.  I would have had to accept the article, rewrite the entire thing, and publish it under the writer's byline.  I would, however, expect that most high school newspapers are able to produce more analysis in their reviews.

Perhaps Moore thought that by pointing out that Oliver is generally on target with his humor counts as analysis.  Perhaps Moore thought "Hey, people don't want thoughtful analysis, they want to know what the jokes were so that when their co-workers are discussing it tomorrow they won't miss the pop culture reference."  That's probably pretty likely I suppose, the general tone of CNN.com is that there is nothing worse that being mildly out of touch with pop culture (the thinking man's solution to this problem is The Onion AV Club's "The Hater" blog - stay in touch with pop culture by reminding yourself of your superiority to pop culture).

Now it would be pretty easy to look up some more of Frazier Moore's work, according to Wikipedia he has been the AP's TV critic since 1992, but I'm going to admit that I'm too lazy to do that (yes, Frazier Moore has a Wikipedia article - he pretty much must have written that himself, right?  No one's like "Hey, you know what would make a good Wikipedia article?  A short bio of the AP's TV critic!").  Maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt, everyone phones one in once in awhile.  Perhaps he literally phoned that one in, but he was using a Verizon cell phone and all his insightful analysis was lost when the call was dropped.

Anyway, it just offends me that someone can write that poorly and still be employed as a professional writer.  I suppose being a TV critic is a tough job.  I mean, the man's probably watched a lot of bullshit in the 16 years, perhaps he's started to believe that television has succeeded and America really is that dumb.  Perhaps he's right.  That's probably what scares me more than anything - not that CNN is so terrible, but that they aren't losing money.  Why isn't capitalism working?!?  Someone has to be able to do this better!

Next time on "I Hate CNN" - Lou Dobbs is a Terrible, Terrible, Populist Moron.