CNN.com

[billbenson]

So I have usually had an instance of yahoo, cnn, this forum open to glance at throughout the day. I considered CNN to be the least biased. There may be better news sites that present both sides of the story. If you know of one, please post it.

That's not the point of this thread though. CNN for a long time has had advertisement videos including their own running all the time. That uses bandwidth. Within the last few weeks they have added automated audio to their site. So I am talking to a customer on the phone and all of a sudden I have Wolf Blitzer screaming at me over rockets blowing up in the background. This goes against every standard I've heard of on sites from distracting moving objects across your screen to unsolicited audio. What are they thinking?

/rant

[Freelancier]

For a while there when international news was more important to me, al Jazeera's English feed was a favorite for getting relatively unbiased info about news not happening here (especially in the middle east, of course). Generally speaking, they're all biased now one way or another, you just get to pick which information silos you want to park yourself inside.

[billbenson]

I liked Anderson Cooper. He would generally present on side of the story and the other later in the week. That is better than having two guests with opposing views get into an argue - fest. No valid information comes out of that.

But the real point of my post was why are sites like cnn stooping to the level off the auto run ads including audio. Yahoo does it to but without audio. And it isn't a loop so it doesn't continually suck up memory.

[Freelancier]

Maybe it helps their numbers. I'm loving adblock

[Harold Mansfield]

I'm noticing a lot of sites auto play audio and video now. News sites are big offenders. Even my local news station websites are doing it.

[KristineS]

I'm guessing every time it plays it ups their numbers. I'd also guess it's a technique that they hope will capture people's attention and perhaps actually get them to watch the video. I hate the automated videos. Very annoying.

[Harold Mansfield]

Most start with an ad. They get paid by how many people see the ad. There's your answer.

[billbenson]

Well I'm seeing fewer of their ads - I won't open the site!