It's Good to Be Dennis

(and george. but not ted. or a guy who wants real news.)

I don’t know where Dennis Roddy gets the time.

When he’s not doing ace reporting for the PG, writing his typically brilliant new PG+ blog — if you miss his column as much as I do, that feature alone is worth the price of the Plus-side — or roaming the orange-coned streets of Pittsburgh to make underground music videos, he’s emailing me with thoughts and tips and observations that might make good TRM fodder.

(That’s right: I’m like his AAA team. And proud to be so.)

Yesterday, his journalistic Spidey senses got to tingling over the House’s passing of what could be the biggest piece of domestic legislation since the passing of Medicare, or at least since that Congresswoman from Texas introduced that Michael Jackson bill to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. So he began to troll the online news sites to get a sense of their coverage.

Fox News gave it their top headline, and somehow resisted using the word socialist.

MSNBC, which Dennis pithily describes as Fox News for vegetarians — I like to think of it as Fox News for Obama supporters — gave it a top headline and looked ahead to its chances in the Senate. Even the CBC — national health care isn’t exactly news up there, you’ll remember — gave it a mention. But the folks at CNN, well...

...they were far more interested in being George Clooney. In a bugler’s final thank you. In a mom who lost 71 pounds. And in those all-important pregame tips from the Tailgating King.

Now, granted, it’s important to know how best to prepare kielbasa on the tailgate of your pick-up before tonight’s Steelers-Broncos tilt. And that photo does seem to suggest that being George Clooney has its fair share of lovely rewards. But you’d like to think that last night, of all nights, they might devote at least a little graphic real estate to legislation not passed by the Iraqi parliament.

This is, of course, hardly the first time that CNN has devoted considerable home page real estate to considerably less than real and relevant news. But it does make you wonder, especially on a day when the new site’s top Don’t Miss Story is Tonight: Oprah’s Book Club, CNN Live!, how you could have missed the news that Ted Turner died and left his once-proud network to the editors of Access Hollywood.

Unless, of course, you were watching CNN at the time.