CNN is fast falling apart, rendering itself completely inert as a viable news organization as its ratings continue to free-fall into near obscurity. Larry King, once the ratings crown-jewel of CNN, has lost half of his audience:

Mr. King’s audience dropped 43 percent for the quarter and 52 percent in March. He dropped to 771,000 viewers for the quarter from 1.34 million in 2009. More alarming perhaps, Mr. King, whose show has been regularly eclipsed by Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC (and is almost quadrupled by Sean Hannity’s show on Fox), is now threatened by a new host, Joy Behar on HLN (formerly Headline News.)

Larry, you’re getting beat by Joy Behar? Perhaps you should have on more interesting guests that are actually relevant to the world we live on. You know, maybe give that charlatan Deepak Chopra a rest and bring on, oh, how about a fucking physicist? How about a scientist? How about people who are creating cutting-edge technology? Directors? Writers? Enough with the partisan hacks and religious nuts pushing disingenuous books, or faux-celebrities with their miracle cures and sexual addictions. It may not mean the difference between winning the ratings war, but at least you’ll lose with some integrity.

While the vast majority of CNN’s problems are directly attributable to programming, some of the blame has to rest with the American public, who, increasingly, gravitates towards partisan entertainers as their only news source, willingly leaving behind rational debate, perfectly happy to reinforce their current beliefs instead of expanding their horizons.

We’re doomed.

The New York Times has more on this messy affair.

Ronald Moore, the creator of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, debuted a new pilot on Fox last Friday called Virtuality. If you didn’t watch it, you’re not alone. In order for a pilot to be picked up for an eventually series, one general rule is that people need to see it. That didn’t happen. Hence, Virtuality will not be a series. Frankly, that’s just as well. Apparently I was one of the few people to watch the show, though I only watched the first half before terminal boredom set in.

Virtuality could have been a good series, but for me, the whole ‘reality show on a spaceship” aesthetic failed to grab.

From TVByTheNumbers:

I’m shocked…SHOCKED! that ‘game journalism’ is being called out for a lack of integrity.

Eurogamer is under attack from the developers of recently released MMO Darkfall, insisting that the final score of 2/10 is completely erroneous. Their proof? They examined the server logs of the two accounts the devs gave the magazine for reviewing purposes and determined the critic played the game for only two hours.

From Darkfall Forum:

When we read the hostile review by Ed Zitron, one thing became apparent: he had not played the game at all. Eurogamer readers and Darkfall players are posting bullet lists of factual errors in the story. The reviewer hadn’t even figured out the very basics of the game before he wrote about it. We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator since during almost every one of the logins the reviewer spent the time creating a new character. The rest of the time was apparently spent taking the low-res screenshots that accompanied the article. At no point did this reviewer spend more than a few minutes online at a time.

Darkfall is the largest MMORPG game of its kind and this guy spent a few minutes playing(?) before he tore it apart. How can someone do that responsibly? Ed Zitron didn’t even give Darkfall a chance.

As someone who spent over 15 years as a ‘game journalist’, I can tell you this is far more common than people know. Any claim of integrity within the gaming press is unfounded and without merit. Most are on the take, puking up great reviews of crappy games so they can keep getting access for the next big preview. Or advertising dollars raise their ugly head as an influence. Or, as is most common, critics are under ridiculous time constraints that simply make playing a game thoroughly an impossibility.

Only thing different about this situation is the proof.

Darkfall Dev Message