Do a Google for "Breaking News", and CNN.com comes up first, with the website title "CNN.com - Breaking News, US, World, Weather, Entertainment & Video..." Click on that link & you'll go to CNN's home page with the same title. Now, do a Google for "News". CNN.com comes up first, but this time with a title of "CNN News Summary". Click on that link, and you'll go to the very same page as above, except that the title of the page is CNN News Summary! Since the title of a webpage is oh so very important in SEO, what exactly is CNN doing here? Are they serving up their home page modified for keywords? Is this Google-legal? I had accidentally done something similar last year, and the site got banned from Google. Is this something that CNN can get away with, but would get most other websites banned from Google?
Google seems to be in the "News Outlets" pockets in a matter of speaking. The New York Times is getting away with cloaking, and now CNN. Really makes it easy to compete . or, there is always the possibility they dont have the ODP meta tag .
That same info is in the Google Directory so it is coming from DMOZ. Google substitutes the page meta for DMOZ info depending on the search performed. The algorithm determines which meta info is most appropriate and then displays it.