Operation Misery: Day 7 - I've Been to See My Mothers.

Well my biological one primarily although the other one did pop in towards the end of the evening.

As is becoming standard practise our smartphones found themselves in other rooms while we talked. My mother did bring hers out later on which kind of killed the conversation. You wouldn't have missed much though because the conversation was all pretty mundane. As my mother is gay and a former Catholic the issue of the new Pope did come up although the topic of CNN's coverage of the Papal conclave for more the focus. So looking for something to say I should probably tell you about that although it's more gossipy rather then something important.

CNN has a quite famous presenter called Anderson Cooper who recently came out as gay. In some parts of the US this is still considered controversial and is most certainly considered controversial within the Catholic Church. So CNN sent Anderson Cooper to anchor their coverage of the conclave and gave him a lot of guest to interview who were both Catholic and well certainly had an air of homosexuality about them. This was obviously an attempt to challenge attitudes towards homosexuality within the US and an effort to be seen to challenge attitudes towards homosexuality within the Catholic Church.

This along with Los Angles diocese's decision to settle historic child abuse allegations right in the middle of the conclave led to a little bit of a feud between CNN and the Church. So while CNN has their massively overblown computer animation of how the conclave worked the Church responded with cheap, low quality photocopies of the type of ballot papers being used. The almost comically black smoke on the first night was more of a general response to complaints from across the global news media that at the 2005 conclave it was difficult for TV cameras to tell whether the smoke being released was black or white.

The main problem with CNN's coverage was that while some of the guests were clearly in on the joke some clearly weren't. So with seemingly endless hours of airtime to fill and not a great deal of sleep CNN's coverage had this wonderful sense of jeopardy that came from a feeling that someone was about to massively lose their temper live on air at any moment. The moment that they'd been talking about the seagull that had been perched on the Vatican chimney for so long that the seagull earned it's own Twitter account was a particular low point.

Oh and as we all wait to see if Rihanna will actually turn up on stage in Philadelphia and make it through her two hour concert Justin Bieber's being saying controversial things about the media on Instagram. It's almost as if the Yanks have now accepted that Chris Brown now has zero credibility and are now trying to introduce a new character.

(Originally Posted) 21:30 on 14/3/13.