CNN's Revisionist Script

I was sitting in the Albany NY airport yesterday, waiting on my 192 minute delayed United Airlines flight from Chicago to arrive, when I heard the ubiquitous CNN anchorwoman (who seems to be piped into every airport in America) say "We've been covering the Occupy Wall Street Protest since it began", and they cut to the 'reporter on the street'.  I was seated with 4 colleagues around me, all of whom I knew for the last 5 days as we were in a training class together, and all of whom had expressed very conservative and/or libertarian leanings throughout the week, as I heard this.  I laughed, heartily, and said "Covered since it began? Really CNN? If by 'since it began' you really mean 4 weeks after it began, and ONLY after the Daily Show mentioned the protests, then sure, 'since it began' is accurate.  Nice revisionist history, CNN."

Sadly, a 5th colleague who was also flying out that afternoon, who is an arch conservative and who never missed an opportunity to throw a verbal dig at President Obama during the 20 minute training-center-to-hotel shuttle bus rides - even when the policy was a continuation of George Bush's (par example: TARP, Quantitative Easing, and Wall Street welfare), was not present at the time, or I am sure he would have had a vociferous and uninformed retort.  The 4 colleagues didn't quite know what to say, and looked down at their shoes. 

It continues to amaze me that when you press most conservatives for facts to support their position, all they can do is repeat well rehearsed talking points - but they do have a canned, preset, black or white answer for everything.  Thinking outside the box is verboten, alien, scary, unpleasantly uncomfortable for most them - at least the ones I have personally encountered, face to face.

A little while later, one of the Wisconsinites colleagues brought up the subject of new feeds, scrolls across the bottom of the screen, and THAT is how he preferred to get all of his news, to which a second Wisconsinite rebuked this concept stating how much he hated distracting scrolls.  I asked the scroll hater if had ever seen Idiocracy, and he laughed heartily, saying he and his wife saw it on Netflix years ago and that they really liked it.

Eventually my United flight did arrive, we did take off again (unusually rapidly loaded - but that's the next post on luggage nazis), and I made it to O'Hare with JUST ENOUGH time to RUN from C22 to F8, to catch my US Airways (code share with United) flight to Phoenix, 1 minute (seriously) before they closed the door.

Ah, the joys of coach class travel.