Reason to Hate CNN International #2: The Weather

Reporting the weather forecast is one of the more useful functions of TV news. It's nice to have some way to anticipate whether you should bring an umbrella to work today or consider canceling that picnic you had planned for the weekend. But 99% of what's useful about knowing weather conditions is only locally relevant. What is the point in trying to report "the weather" on a global news network?

CNNi fills a lot of airtime with a graphic that shows current conditions in a random smattering of 20 or so cities while some new age music plays in the background. I'm telling you, it's on so often I hear the music in my sleep. And it's next to useless! Great. I now know it's 25 degrees in Muscat. Now please show me again 5 minutes from now. (I consider myself pretty good with my world cities and I had to look that one up, but at least I know it's partly cloudy there with a chance of rain.) Unsurprisingly, Niamey never makes the cut. But even if they decided viewers in Niamey could also benefit from knowing current conditions and graciously added us to the rotation of cities, what are the odds that I'd be watching (or paying attention) on the occasion when Niamey's number comes up?

What you also get, slightly less frequency but still multiple times every hour, is the typical "weatherman/woman standing in front of the map" routine. I think they throw darts at a spinning globe once or twice a day when they feel like changing the map. This morning I got a nice rundown of conditions in the US (all temperatures in degrees Celsius, of course). Tomorrow I'm hoping for Australia.

Reason to Hate CNN International #1: It's Everywhere and Unavoidable

I'm kind of a junkie for news and current events. Considering I've lived overseas in non-English speaking countries for roughly five of the past ten years, this hasn't always been an easy hobby to keep up with. My thirst for international English language news while living abroad has often forced me under the oppressive thumb of the hegemon, CNN International. After years of suffering under this abomination of a news channel I've decided to use this space to fight back by listing all the reasons I can think of to hate CNN International.

For reasons I'll elaborate on in future posts, it truly is a terrible, terrible news source to be forced to depend on. But if English is your most comfortable language, you're living or traveling outside of the English speaking world, and you're the kind of person who can't go five minutes without wondering if there's been a coup d'état, cyclone, or terrorist attack somewhere, there is simply no way to avoid it. If you're a college student living abroad for the first time and CNN International is being pumped into your bedroom while the lurid details of the president's affair with his intern are being broadcast to the world, are you going to change the channel to watch somebody babble incomprehensibly in Swedish? If you're living in a small African village relying almost exclusively on a shortwave radio and the BBC World Service to tell you what's happening in the world and your employer puts you up for a few days in a hotel with a TV and only one English channel, would you have the willpower to avert your attention?

Well, me neither. And when I finally broke down last week and got a satellite TV connection in my house, it was entirely predictable that I'd be drawn back to my old nemesis. Did Obama pick up any more superdelegates? Is the Burmese junta going to allow foreigners to deliver aid to the cyclone victims? What's happening in the NBA playoffs? Only one way to find out...