In the course of my normal morning hunt for what's going on in the world of gaming, and the world in general, I happened to stop over at CNN.com. Scanning the page, I stumbled upon the site's, and therefore the network's, daily poll question. Normally the polls on major news organization's websites are somehow connected to the day's events. So, in a very generic form, you might expect to see something like, "Do you agree with the president's recent decision?" or "Did you watch last night's big television event?". The point being that although they're usually inane questions, they are somehow connected to something you have read or can read from the homepage. Today, however, the poll question is something a bit different. As you can see above, today CNN is asking its viewers and readers about an important hot-button issue: "Are video games bad for kids?"

If you look at the rest of the CNN.com homepage right now, there are absolutely no stories that present any contextual information about this question. I was expecting a science headline along the lines of, "New study on video games show adverse effects on children" or even a world/news headline like "Man killed over video game". In fact, the only story anywhere on the front of CNN right now is about Starcraft II, and it's a link to a glowing review of the game, reading, "StarCraft II lives up to hype.". Essentially, CNN is asking its viewers to answer a question for which no information has been provided, which from a news outlet borders on the land of discredited.

Moreover, not only are we posed this question without information, the question itself is so vague as to be next to impossible to answer accurately. What is "bad"? Are we being asked about a child's inactivity while playing? Is this meant to find out if people think children spend too much time playing? No, the problem with this question as worded, is that its open to any kind of interpretation, which, again, is not the job of a news organization. Chances are CNN simply wanted to do yet another tired segment about the horrors of children being exposed to video games, and in the lack of any real damning evidence, will drag out the results of this poll as some sort of proof. You can already see from the answers that it's working:

So far, with absolutely no back-up information, almost 100,000 people have claimed that they think that "video games ARE bad for kids". Yes, I can see that CNN does not purport this to be a "scientific" survey, but does that make the spurious nature of it any more forgivable? Instead of seizing an opportunity to set itself apart as the kind of news organization that is actually interested in engaging its audience in a well-reasoned discussion of an issue, CNN has opted to go for the easy out. While it's ridiculous to expect an A/B poll question to provide the kind of insightful conversation that is sorely lacking in the modern news cycle, it's not an impossible request. I have no doubt that someone out there will point out that in the world of the blogosphere and several other 24-hour news networks, CNN is already as minor of a news source as possible, but the simple poll numbers show that there is still an audience for this kind of "news", and it's an audience that doesn't seem to care much about context.