What has happened to CNN?

CNN is like a lot of things in America these days, it's not what it used to be. It all started out with so much promise in 1980. Ted Turner and all his money setting out to start up a 24 hour news channel. It would be news 24 hours a day around the clock and the highest quality too, no fluff. The other news programs were laughing at them in the beginning because they were so green but after a while they were not laughing anymore and they were worried about the new kid on the block and what he could do. For years it lived up to the promise and surpassed it for the most part more or less. In the last several years CNN has caught a disease. I like to call it Fox-News-itis. This occurs when a news organization begins to value ratings over substance. This can be fatal for a legitimate news organization if they value their reputation that is. I just gave up and stopped watching. I got upset one day when i clicked on to CNN and they went into a commercial break that lasted so long that i actually forgot what channel i was watching. You know like when you are sitting there during the commercials and you are just tuning them all out and you are waiting for CNN to come back on? It had been so long since i heard any news that i actually could not recall for a moment what channel i was watching. That was the end for me. It felt like CNN was like a greedy pimp and i was just one of the hookers. I just got tired of having my eyes whored out to their advertisers every other minute. Besides they dont do real news all that much anymore really. I didn't need wall to wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death and all the freaks who were fighting about the paternity of her daughter and her estate. I got Entertainment Tonight for that if i wanted it. I dont need live coverage of police chases from news choppers in L.A. I got Fox News for junk like that. Their never ending alerts In red flashing letters on the screen. I love the way fox tries to paint it as real news and not a cheesy move to spike up their ratings on a slow news day. These are cheap attempts to increase the number of viewers watching their network so that they can go back to their advertisers and sponsors and demand more money for every 30 second spot they run. I expect this garbage from Fox because its a faux news network but when CNN does it i feel betrayed. I felt like as a viewer that my interests were no longer paramount anymore to them. I was now just a means to their end of increasing profits. CNN is like an honor student you went to college with who graduated at the top of the class with all the promise in the world and now you bump into them years later and they are a security guard at Wal-Mart. Your standing there in a shock thinking to yourself WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED! HOW DID THEY END UP HERE DOING THIS! In the case of CNN the answer is of course greed. Its not that CNN does not make a profit it just wants to make more of a profit. When that becomes the goal then they compromise their integrity and you end up with reports about who the winner of American Idol was and that kind of stuff. They became panderers. I stopped watching because CNN turned its back on me as a viewer too much. I dont mind that stuff every once in a while but it became so dominant in their broadcasts. They have just drifted so far away from what they are supposed to be. They are now just a news room full of ratings chasers that pay only lip service to the notion of serving the public trust.