Where Were You?

I was watching the Phillies-Mets game on ESPN and flipping around the channels during the commercial breaks when I came upon CNN, where the screen featured a "Breaking News" crawl that was short on details but heavy on the hype. The host and Wolf Blitzer kept going back and forth with the "We don't want to speculate but this is going to be BIG" angle. Wolf must've said something along those lines at least 10 or 12 times and when my viewing partner asked what it could be I joked that Obama was probably going to tell us it's okay to carry nail clippers and bottled water onto airplanes again. Ha ha!

When Wolf said, again, "This is going to be BIG, but we don't want to engage in any wild speculation like 'some other channels' are doing..." I quick switched over to FOX where, sure enough, Geraldo Rivera was jumping up and down like his hair was on fire with the announcement that "OSAMA BIN LADEN IS DEAD!!"

Turned out he was right, of course, but the contrast in journalistic styles between CNN and FOX could not have been more starkly apparent. CNN waited probably another 10 minutes before reporting that the "breaking news" -- which they still claimed to have scooped -- was OBL's death.