UPDATE, 1730 EDT: As noted in the comments, the CNN.com Political Ticker page has switched the Franken story with one about Mark Kirk filing for the Senate, so the blurb has been replaced with "Ticker: Republican eyes old Obama seat," making this diary OBE. Thanks to all who responded...even unto the littlest among you.... ;)
This afternoon, as I often do, I surfed over to CNN.com to have a glance at the headlines. Under "Latest News" I found the following disheartening blurb:
Ticker: Dogs first priority for Sen. Franken
I admit, to my eternal chagrin, that my first thought was Aah, geez, Al, what are you doing to the [Democratic] brand now?
I followed the link to the full story, & my dismay turned quickly to fury. Why? Follow me below the fold for the answer--
The story on CNN's Political Ticker, by Lauren Kornreich, is actually headlined
Franken's first goal: Dogs for vets
--which is (ahem) another animal entirely.
It gets better:
Newly-minted Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, unveiled his first legislative goal Monday — providing funding to train dogs to work with wounded veterans.
"Service dogs ... can be of immense benefit to vets suffering from physical and emotional wounds," Franken wrote in a column published in the Star Tribune.
(snip)
The Minnesota Democrat also said there is evidence to show that this kind of program could help reduce the suicide rate among veterans.
What especially infuriated me is that the less-misleading story title is actually one character shorter than the front page blurb (35 vs. 36 with spaces but not counting "Ticker: "). For that matter, the more accurate "Dogs for wounded vets Franken’s goal" is the same length (36 with spaces).
In other words, there was no reason of brevity to omit from the front-page blurb the fact that Senator Franken's priority is the welfare of our wounded veterans, not "dogs". In fact, the omission had to be deliberate, because even if the blurb-writer had read no more than the story headline s/he would have known that Franken's focus, as admirably detailed in his op-ed piece (link above), is on the welfare of veterans.
This is not the first time that CNN blurb-writers have gone out of their way to craft and post a blurb on CNN.com that is not only misleading but actively demeans and/or ridicules Democrats and the Democratic Party, up to and including the current President of the United States. It is done in full knowledge that most page viewers will never click past the blurb to find the truth & will only retain the negative impression.
I fired off an e-mail complaint to CNN.com asking them to fix the blurb and then to find and terminate, not the poor schlub who wrote this blurb, but the higher-ups who let this sort of smear pass routinely, or who may in fact actively encourage it for their own petty reasons. It may not change anything, but IMO we need to let operations like CNN know we see exactly what they're doing & will hold them accountable for it one day.