The large body of text in italics is the same as “regular italics”, except that the formatting has to be applied for each paragraph. Any time you hit the “Enter” key to end a line, you would also need to apply your special formatting. (That applies whether it is whisper text, bold, italic, underlined, monospace
or whatever.)
As to the links to CNN that contain the text you want, I think that is explained in the formatting link above, isn’t it? In any case, you need to include “what the link should say” in quotation marks, followed immediately by a colon and then immediately thereafter by the URL.
I’m still trying to understand highlighting (and now strike-through, since I also saw that on a post earlier this week).