CNN's '11 Meteor Tweets We Wish We'd Thought Of' Bums Me Out
Ratings-starved CNN is changing its focus, and that's cool. They hadn't been committed to straight news reporting for some time, but really hadn't fully made the leap into baseless sensationalism until just a few weeks ago when "flesh egg" Jeff Zucker took the reins. Their 24-hour coverage of the "shit cruise" was exemplary sensationalism, even going so far as to compare a group of inconvenienced vacation-ers to victims of Katrina.
But the headline which has been on their front page all day, "11 meteor tweets we wish we'd thought of," is useless and stupid in a heartbreaking way. Because they don't actually wish they'd thought of those tweets. Those tweets aren't funny and they know it. It's like listening to a comedian tell a painfully unfunny joke, and then being like, damn, I wish I had told that joke to a bunch of people instead of that guy. At least that guy made a snarky comment about something. Ooooo, I wish I was that guy! But you cannot be that guy. You are a news organization. And that guy sucks, anyway.
Three weeks ago, another guy made a Twitter account, a parody account, of the dolphin trapped in the Gowanus Canal. He was shocked when people harassed him for a Twitter parody account, thinking the problem people had with him was that he was speaking in the voice of a dying creature. It wasn't because of that. It was because parody accounts of current events are just so goddamn unfunny, they are intolerable even in a world of noise.
Yesterday, Jake Fogelnest claimed the @RussianMeteor Twitter account and discouraged anyone from creating another parody account. These happened anyway, and obviously the war against parody accounts is un-winnable. But at the end of the day, who cares? It's just some more noise, and that is what the Internet mostly is.
Which is what bums me out about that CNN article. Because they don't wish they thought of those tweets. They can't think of those tweets, because they are a news organization. But I guess they're not really much of that anymore, either. So instead of saying, "we wish we'd thought of" these tweets, just write your own. Here are some "funny" tweets. Here is even more noise.