Et tu, CNN?

Yes, it's that time! Time for the Annual YouTube Video Awards show! (If you didn't know that it was "annual", you must have missed last year's "inaugural" YouTube Video Awards show.) But more on that later.

Over yonder at cnn.com, they lead with this story on their 'Technology' page. The lead-in reads: "Tay Zonday morphed from an unknown musician to an Internet superstar who got booked on national TV shows after his song "Chocolate Rain" -- an amateur clip of his baritone crooning -- went viral last year. Now he's among the 12 winners of the second annual YouTube Video Awards, recognizing the top user-created videos of 2007. full story" OK, that's fine. Here is a picture of Tay Zonday:

Now, if you were thinking that is the picture that accompanied the lead-in to the story, well, you'd be wrong. Either that or Tay Zonday has morphed from a geeky guy with a keyboard and a voice like a baritone moose into something that's just a little hotter. Here is the picture that accompanied that story:
For those of you who just come out from under your rock to read my blog, well, thank you. But aside from that, the lovely woman above is Amber Lee Ettinger, otherwise known lovingly to many millions of Internet users (and many millions who do other things while using the Internet) as Obama Girl.

Did I mention that she didn't win a YouTube Video Award? She didn't. She was nominated in the politics category, but the video entitled "Stop the Clash of Civilizations" by the global organization avaaz.org, ended up winning instead. YouTube spokesman Aaron Ferstman commented on this by saying, "The (political) video that actually won in an election year wasn't one that had anything to do with the election itself. The video that deals with ... serious issues like discrimination, and that video's done in kind of a neat way that speaks to young people."

Clearly, Mr. Ferstman has never seen the Obama Girl video. If he had, he would realize that it too, didn't have much to do with the elction itself. No, it had to do with how hot Amber Lee is. She could have been singing "I've Got A Crush On Osama" and 7 million people STILL would have watched it (AND done other things at the same time.). Here's a link to an earlier post of mine with the Obama Girl video. See for yourself. Obama, Osama, you won't care. Mocking Words

And while I am not one to ever, EVER turn down anything even remotely related to Obama Girl (except maybe Obama himself), I find this ridiculous, especially from CNN. Yes, I'd rather look at her than Tay. But they at least could have mentioned her in the lead-in to at least make it semi-credible or justifiable to have a huge picture of her accompany it. But instead, CNN has stooped to where the rest of media has gone and just went for something that's hot rather than actually reporting on what you're supposed to be reporting on. Sadness. Sure, there's looking at Amber Lee to cheer us up a bit, but it's still sad.

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