72-plus point fonts. Really?

How big exactly would CNN.com and HuffingtonPost.com have their fonts if we had a national tragedy on the scale of 9/11? Here are the front pages from these two sites today:

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And journalists wonder why the public has this animus toward the national media. I mean, 12 dead is a big deal; no one disputes that, but where is the limit? Do online news editors use some kind of strange calculus to correlate body counts to the appropriate font size, as if to say, “We only had one death today, guys. Let’s just go with 20 points.” Some national news outfits have sacrificed news gathering for sensationalism and deploy strategies such as these to simply grab website hits and visits rather than informing. By comparison, see the more respectable presentations from CBS and NBC:

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