Media Critique: CNN's "The Latest"

When you look at the sidebar that says "The Latest" on a a news website, you expect all of the need to know news pieces for that day. That is not the case with CNN. Instead of putting important events, it displays a feature articles titled "Breast Implants in Short Supply", "Miley Cyrus Flag Stunt Condemned", and "Did LeBron get his hairline fixed". I don't know about you as readers, but these excuses for feature articles hardly even qualify as journalism. They break a multitude of principles and yardsticks of journalism.

The first principle this section of the website violated was Watchdog. Not a single article featured was censoring or even centered on politics. The only mention of any American, political leader was in the article "Obama's Republican cousin is...?" which focuses on the fact that Senator Ted Cruz is Obama's cousin. A fact that is this worthless for the average American. The next principle broken by this sidebar is Make the Important Interesting. This principle doesn't work the other way around. Make the Interesting Important is definitely not a principle. Not only are none of these articles important, but CNN also tries to make them seem far more essential than they truly are.

Now to start on the seven yardsticks. Obviously none of these articles are newsworthy, for reasons previously stated and because hardly anything written there will have any sort of lasting impact. This sort of household gossip should not be allowed on a national website. This section of the CNN website definetly needs some reviewing and should be edited to only show events that are actually meaningful in peoples' everyday lives.