Why would CNN deceive its viewers?

It is a sad story of the effects of the U.S. corporate synergy and how mainstream infotainment industry no longer informs nor entertains its viewers. Rather, it makes them sick and insults their intelligence.

HLN anchor Nancy Grace and CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield holding split-screen interview in same parking lot were obnoxious!

That seemed to be indeed a bizarre television and spatial anomaly on CNN aired May 7, 2013, from Phoenix, Arizona.  The coverage of two true-crime stories by the two “news” anchors conducting a "satellite" interview from the very same parking lot, background traffic and all, was stunning, to say the least. The whole scene of the two hosts putting up a little pathetic dramaturgy of their faked long-distance telephone conversation was absolutely unbearable.

Grace and Banfield were in the same parking lot, facing in the same direction, and judging by the speed of the vehicles in their shots, they could not be sitting more than 30 feet away from each other. Yet, they were behaving as if they were on opposite sides of the world.

In a way, the CNN had long opened a new chapter in today’s high tech news coverage world. Given the shameless boldness they had done it with this time, perhaps it would not come as a surprise that the CNN had pulled that trick on it’s viewers more than once in the past, too. They are so used to doing it already that they do not even bother too much to conceal the fact. Why would they do that and not really care about such nuances?

According to the Atlantic Wire, later that day, when the blanket interview was taking place, Banfield would conduct another interview (this time about Arias) with another Headline News host who was in a different location than Grace, but still in the same parking lot.

Besides, a third HLN regular was somewhere else in the Phoenix area. Also, outdoors and presumably close by. There was also the CNN reporter who was standing across the street from her, waiting in front of the courthouse.

All in all, it was a four-headed interview with four people in the exact same city covering the exact same story on at least three different programs on two different networks owned by the same company. That’s a noticeable example of a corporate synergy.

CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield and HLN anchor Nancy Grace are on two different networks.  They share the same parent company and probably wouldn't be talking to each other if they were true competitors. Cable TV news is known to be in the habit of featuring "remote" split-screen interviews with hosts and guests, even when they're in the same building.

Grace and Banfield were both in Phoenix to cover the Jody Arias murder case. But despite being on sister stations and the fact that Grace would literally only need to walk a few brisk steps to join Banfield on the same camera, they had to put up a theater to create illusion that the two broadcast teams were working apart.

HLN, formerly known as CNN Headline News (often abbreviated as HN) and CNN2, is a spinoff of the cable news television channel, CNN. The news world has grown increasingly incorporated over the past twenty-thirty years. The U.S. mainstream news coverage has turned into a mixture of dubious information presentation and entertainment. Both cable news information and entertainment content are usually controlled by one and the same corporation.

Nonetheless, the various outlets of one and the same corporation have to pretend that they operate  like separate entities. It remains to be seen, though, what CNN fears most, the realization by the median public that all smaller mainstream news outlets are controlled by one and the same small group of people, or that the bogus news programs, presented in an entertaining way by the CNN (as well as FOX News) hosts, will finally be completely discarded and thrown away, along with those notorious news companies themselves, and treated for what they really are - an informational trap and a news smokescreen, designed to conceal what is really going on in the U.S. and/or around the world by its corporate masters.