Portal news switch

On my portal page, I had a link to CNN.com. I didn't really want it there, but at the time, no other news site was consistently reliable. CNN displayed nice on Mac browsers, and it's coverage, while always mediocre, was not too insulting to my intelligence. I didn't like it, but I didn't hate it either.

I mean, CNN always did their best to equate bin Laden to Hussein, which caused me to switch over to ABC.com for a time, but that was when ABC had a raw news feed, where news stories came right off the wire, unedited. It was kind of neat, really, but that didn't last long, and once they got rid of it, they began to wall off much of their content, and I began to feel Disney was busy watching the bottom line. I switched back to CNN, reluctantly, but it was still better than the alternatives.

MSNBC was run by Microsoft. That isn't horrible in of itself, since I used to read Slate.com, which up until recently was run by MS, but MSNBC was lousy on Mac browsers. Horrible. Almost as bad as my site is on IE for PC, and that's bad.

CBS was more like an online advertisement for it's television broadcasts, and FoxNews, of course, I would sooner drown in a bathtub that trust it for actual news. I linked to the BBC for a while, but their coverage was specifically about the big events happening in America, and some smaller, but often more interesting, stories never made it on their site.

So I stayed with CNN. But it was getting worse and worse and worse. Today was it. One of their seven or so top stories, displayed right near the top of the page was "Actress Tiffany Thiessen gets married." Gee, I care. Why is this worthy of national news? At least, I should have been thankful that this bit of entertainment fluff won out for the prestigious headline spot over "Johansson: Nudity yes, bra no," which, while still on the front page, was regulated to their entertainment section. I admit, I clicked on the link. It was an advertisement for The Island disguised as an article where Scarlett Johansson expressed dismay at a cheap bra they wanted her to wear during a love scene to keep the PG-13 rating.

At this point, I said goodbye to CNN.

I clicked on over to MSNBC. The page looked good on Safari, my browser, and it has a blog by Keith Olbermann, who is probably the best newscaster in the business, but will never get anywhere because he knows things, and people hate the smart guy. Thiessen's pending marriage was not to be found within the top stories, for some reason, and Scarlett Johansson and the cheap bra was regulated to the second tier on the Entertainment page, and was not found on the main site.

And so there it is. I'm putting MSNBC on the portal page. I should have ditched CNN a long time ago.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:27 PM, 12 July 2005

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