Lori Falce makes some good points in her column “Yes, your kid should watch the news at school”. Who can be against that? However, her support of CNN10 is shortsighted. It reveals a naivete that I would not expect from an experienced news person.
CNN10 meets a key test of J. Edgar Hoover’s “Masters of Deceit”: Create a “front” organization to conceal your real purpose. Perhaps 10’s content is more even than CNN’s cable channel at first glance. But that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to plant a seed. When a student leaves school, what news channel will he/she first go to? The one that he/she was first exposed to. That’s what the student knows. The seed is cultivated to digest what the “successor” produces.
Falce, quite surprisingly, goes even further, holding that even if CNN10 were biased, “it is still important for people to learn to consume news with open eyes and open minds.” That’s possibly true if you’re presented both sides of an issue.
Louis F. D’Emilio
Penn Township, Westmoreland County