MOLI VIEW™

Among our culture's holiday traditions is a tendency for companies to bury bad news by releasing it when media organizations are working with a skeleton crew. There are usually some executive "resignations" on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, and sometimes bad results just happen to become available on the day after Thanksgiving. This year, for example, Microsoft announced a pretax charge of more than $1 billion to cover defective Xbox 360 consoles very close to the Fourth of July holiday. More recently, Jay-Z practically crawled out of his Def Jam contract on Christmas Eve.

So I make a habit of checking CNN.com at least once every holiday, just to see if anything interesting is going wrong. This year, I realized that something is wrong with CNN itself.

For more than a year, the network has been running a feature called I-Report, where consumers can send in video footage they've taken themselves. Sometimes the footage is newsworthy. Sometimes it fleshes out a national story. And sometimes it's just plain stupid. On Christmas, one of the most important news organizations in the world used the front page of its website to promote a story about a family's snow sculpture. Also, this just in: Weird-looking guys in red suits sometimes scare little kids!

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