the noses of CNN

And now, for something completely different:

Every once in a while I watch CNN. The network is a far cry from its glory days of a decade and a half ago. Gone is the news and the excellent reporting. For a while one could watch CNN Europe (London) on CNNfn at night, but when they bagged that it was all downhill from there.

CNN ditched the news to be replaced by sound bites, irrelevant tidbits, rumors, in a what appears to have been a silly attempt at being "fair and balanced." At least Fox Noise only says it is fair and balanced. The best remedy against such blatant biases is to do what Keith Olbermann did. At the very least Keith is entertaining and an effective anti-dote against one-sided views.

But I digress.

It occurred to me while watching Campbell Brown -sitting in for Anderson Cooper as the saying goes- that there was a problem with her nose. And when she started talking to Randi Kaye and a few minutes later to Dana Bash, I noticed that all these women have the same nose problem. There seems to be an endemic nose problem at CNN. Many women, including Gloria Borger, Christi Paul, Kyra Phillips, and others unseen have this skinny, straight, hairline nose with narrow nostrils that must make breathing difficult. I did not dig into this any further and some of these noses may have been congenital but the majority appear restored.

I read that Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a practicing neurosurgeon -the latter no doubt explains why he seems to know so little about medicine, remember that joke about surgeons ? They can do everything but they don't know anything.- but it appears he may have taken up a role as resident plastic surgeon.

Is all of this fall-out from the Greta Van Susteren-Paula Zahn debacle that we witnessed six years ago? Poor Greta, trying to be fair and balanced at Fox Noise, despite an eye-lift that came too late to save the day, but that is another story too...

Are nose jobs the remedy ? Reporters are often said to have a nose for a good story. Are these women trying to improve their sense of reporting ? Or do the nose jobs (and eye lifts) reflect the subtle massaging of the facts that is so endemic in the 21st century newscast? Make it all look pretty and appealing so the advertisers are happy?

Nothing more befitting a program whose sole objective has now become to promote consumerism and sell useless junk.

I smell something fishy, do you?