PICK YOUR color, pick your size, and pick your headline.
For only $15 plus shipping and handling fees, a CNN Shirt can be yours. That’s right. Newly released in 2008 by America’s supposedly top news organization, the CNN Shirt is your chance to purchase the organization’s most popular, most entertaining news headlines printed conveniently on a tee.
Today, T-shirts are bought and worn as one of the most reliable forms of self-expression and identity creation. They tell others who we are (“Kiss Me, I’m Irish,” “Little Miss Naughty”), what we think (“Gay? Fine By Me,” “Blondes Do It Better”), where we come from (“Virginia Is for Lovers,” “Girls Raised in the South”). They’re comfortable, non-gendered — at least in their fit, if not in their messages as well — and relatively cheap. In today’s world, where self-expression and self-importance reign supreme, T-shirts are a quintessential method of asserting one’s identity.
But what exactly does the advent of the CNN Shirt say about society? It’s one thing to slap a provocative message on a T-shirt and wear it in the name of politics, or to don a shirt bearing the logo of your favorite sports team in the name of team spirit. But to slap the day’s B-section news stories on a T-shirt? Why not just paste the National Enquirer to your chest?
The latest T-shirt headlines to choose from, according to CNN.com, include “Bag boy finds $10,000 in store bathroom,” “Turkey ‘flirts’ with TV reporter,” and “Peanut butter ‘miracle’ saves lives.” This hodge-podge of eye-catching but ultimately pointless news amounts to a blatant attempt by CNN to sell that which it (unfortunately) reports. It isn’t as if the network hasn’t already commercialized the news, turning 24-hour live coverage of world events into a lucrative business. But to actually sell the news as merchandise is beyond ridiculous.
If you browse the most popular T-shirt headlines of 2008 on CNN.com, there appears momentarily to be a more hopeful side to this story in the fact that the most popular shirt reads “Obama makes history.” At least a political and historical achievement took top billing, you may say to yourself. Yet the second and third most popular headlines (“1 in 3 workers hung over at office” and “Victoria’s Secret sued for thong injury”) once again reaffirm the utterly outrageous undertaking that is the CNN Shirt.
Not only do these shirts reflect poorly on CNN — the funds from the shirt sales don’t even go to charity — but they also call into question our own motives for wearing something so absurd. We tend to be extremely sensitive about the T-shirts we choose to wear. Our favorites are the ones we buy on an overseas vacation or the ones we receive after running that grueling half marathon. They mark our exploits and accomplishments, and they tell others what we think we’re all about.
Yet wearing a CNN Shirt implies nothing more than the fact that we, like so many other Americans, only read the news for the headlines, and only the most weirdly interesting ones at that. It’s as if by wearing a shirt, we are announcing to the world that we do, in fact, skim the paper. Moreover, according to the CNN advertisement for the shirts, “There is a headline for everyone.” Whether your headline is “Roads made safer with cheese” or “How many birds will fit in a turkey?”, you probably won’t look like the smartest person in the room either way. The only statement you will be making is that your poor choice in dress is right on par with your poor choice in news.
So when you’re doing your holiday shopping or looking for the perfect birthday gift for a friend, you may want to consider leaving the CNN Shirt alone. Buying one will not only assure CNN that it’s actually doing an admirable job of reporting the day’s major headlines (headlines like “Long-lost Furby look-alike is found” and “Church launches 7-day ‘sexperiment’”), but it will also confirm that today’s society wants nothing more than to read the most bizarre, irrelevant news stories while major events pass us by.
Or perhaps, more hopefully, CNN’s new little venture, which began only this year, will fail miserably, collapsing in the realization that Americans are, in fact, smart enough to avoid the enticing lure of a glorified tabloid headline displayed unapologetically across their chests. After all, do we really want to walk around in a shirt announcing, “UFO in site, then ‘pfft’—it was gone”?
Amelia Meyer’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at a.meyer@cavalierdaily.com.
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