To the left is a screen capture of this morning's CNN front page. (Click for a more detailed view.) In my estimation, the biggest news stories out there are: 1) Iraq showing signs of rejecting a permanent U.S. military presence, 2) flooding in the upper midwest, 3) the Presidential election, 4) the government in South Korea breaking up, and 5) European-style gas prices becoming popular in the U.S. Well, "popular" may not be exactly the right word.CNN, however, thinks I want to know how "Housing crisis hits 90210 hoods." And it backs up its description of high-end housing suffering price declines as "90210 hoods" with a photograph of a house in Atlanta, 3,000 miles away from the 90210 zip code. Maybe I wasn't aware that "90210" was now an adjective. Maybe the use of hip-hop words on headlines (e.g. "bling" and "hood") turns out to not be such a good idea, yo.
But the problem is deeper than that. It's not news at all that the high end of the housing market is suffering from price declines. Every segment of the market has been, and it's one of the two major symptoms of the economic problems facing the country. In the past year and a half, homes have lost an average of 15% of their value; in some markets (coastal cities and their outlying areas) it's twice that much. It's called the "bubble bursting" and it was pretty much inevitable. If I'd had have known it would last as long as it did, maybe I'd have waited a while to buy Soffit House, but then again I'm perfectly happy with buying when I did.
Elsewhere on the page, we can see a video report on how the Chinese earthquake has affected pandas. In political news, we can learn that Obama's VP selection team is thinking about a lot of people. Someone who will be known the rest of her life as "Incest Cellar Girl" has awoken from a coma. That's the best news CNN could find. Not a word about Iraq or South Korea, despite the fact that I have the "International" edition of CNN.
I didn't screen-cap it, but if you scroll down a bit, you'll get another video about "Just who is this 'Stephen Colbert' character?" Seriously? There are still people out there who don't know what the "Colbert Report" is?
CNN often aggravates me with their take on what is important. They are a lot like USA Today, and more and more like Fox News. Its no wonder people turn to People Magazine and the National Inquirer to assuage their fears that something important may actually be affecting them.
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