Blog O’ Obscurity

CNN is interesting.  They’ve had three different takes on what is ruffly the same story today.  First the news that Obama’s passport info had been breached - just a regular story but the one that gets the biggest picture on the home page.  Later they put n their red stripe across the top that there is BREAKING NEWS - Clinton’s passport info has been breached.  Now they have decided the story isn’t all that important but not quite as unimportant as it originally was so we have a yellow stripe DEVELOPING STORY - all three presidential candidates’ passport files have been breached.

Now I’m not one to form my own opinions, I need someone to do that for me and CNN is the source I have chosen.  Exactly how am I supposed to feel about this?   Is this just another day at the beach, horrifying or something I might want to be concerned about later?  I hope they figure out how I’m supposed to feel about this soon, because all I’ve got to go on right now is anxiety.

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I spend too much time reading news.  I just need to let it go, but I seem to be addicted.  And then I find my blood starts to boil because I read the same story in more than one place, but the details are different.

Just yesterday, I read about how Southwest Airlines is grounding 44 of their planes.  I mean, 42.  I mean 38.

I don’t know what the real number is and, honestly, it doesn’t actually matter but I feel like something as simple as this should be easy to get right.  The company does put out press releases for this sort of thing, don’t they?  So all that would be needed would be to read the thing, right?  Maybe not even read the whole thing - just scan for a number.

Why put in the number at all if you don’t know for sure what it is?  Why not do one of those ‘more than’ things like “More than 25 planes have been grounded.”  It helps give it a serious tone which seems to be what they were going for.

I was just whining to my mom today that news articles don’t contain enough details for me to form a knowledgeable opinion about most of the things they like to write about.  Despite that, I’ll take no details over incorrect or made up ones any day of the week.

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A bomb goes off in New York and a person on a bike is seen hastily riding away.  Letters arrive in Congress with pictures of a person standing in front of the bombed building (before it was bombed) with a sign saying “We Did It”.  We are told that the two are unrelated and given a plausible story for how this could be so.

The conspiracy theorists are going to love this one.  I’m even tempted to come up with something.

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