I remember CNN bursting onto the scene. It was revolutionary. Although there was never (even today) enough news to fill a 24hr period. Just endless repeats of the same block of news.
I remember CNN bursting onto the scene. It was revolutionary. Although there was never (even today) enough news to fill a 24hr period. Just endless repeats of the same block of news.
> Although there was never (even today) enough news to fill a 24hr period.
Of course there's enough news; they simply choose not to report on it. This is true both domestically and certainly around the world. Presumably this is a mixture of highly dubious editorial decision and some reasoning that this doesn't make money.
The original "Situation Room" concept with Wolf was pulling in all these live feeds from all over the place and reporting on them. Car chase in LA! Train crash in India! Protest in Paris! Let's go live!
They had a web subscription product around 2006 that gave you access to just watch all these raw feeds from CNN Affiliates all over the world. It was like Periscope but all "professional" feeds.
Now instead of so many repeats, we get panels of 5 talking heads "analyzing" 15 seconds of news for 15 minutes.
TV news is garbage everywhere.
Of all the fascinating things that I’ve seen, there was a Moscow TV station rebroadcasting CNN during the Gulf War.
My memory is hazy, and I accepted it as-is at the time, but the idea that American news could be watched live shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union seems entirely wild.
News isn't watched, it's read. There's extraordinary convincing power in having a talking head say things to you. You're way more likely to believe it regardless of truth. It's why they all do it.
I don't think so. In latter decades CNN descended into a spin zone with blatant conflicts-of-interest, such as:
- CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux was married to Karine Jean-Pierre (Biden's press sec, 2022-5)
- CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour is married to James Rubin, (was Clinton admin asst. secretary of state for public affairs, 1997-2000)
- Jen Psaki's 2017 revolving-door when she was said to be actively shopping herself for a job at CNN while still Obama's WH communications director (no 12-month "cooling-off" period). Left WH 1/2017, joined CNN 2/2017.
- for decades now, CNN seems to function like a retirement home for Clinton-era operatives like James Carville and Donna Brazile. In particular this was a blatant conflict-of-interest in the 2016 primary (Hilary vs Bernie, and the DNC shenanigans). I've seen many bloggers say that TV loves these commentators not because they're that relevant or insightful, but because they steer candidates and their budgets towards big wasteful traditional media spends (and not more targeted internet campaigns, like Obama 2008 or Trump 2016).
- the legendary 2004 takedown of CNN's Crossfire debate show (a younger Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala) by Jon Stewart ("You're on CNN! The show that leads into me is puppets making prank phone calls! What is wrong with you?")
I don't find talking heads persuasive, and one simple antidote is to flick between coverage of the same issue on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, PBS, ABC/NBC/CBS, BBC, DW, RT, foreign channels, etc. to see conflicting narratives, or sometimes conflicting facts.
Maybe the better converse question is: when did CNN stop being any more credible and up-to-the-minute than other news sources (incl. internet ones, or SM)? Maybe late 1990s. Its rise and fall parallel the Clinton admin.
(Why did this get downvoted? I'm genuinely interested in how CNN went from being a premium news source (Somalia 1993) to the current thing, after several takeovers. This has contemporary relevance, like an inability to make objective criticism of the DNC in 2016 or 2024).
Orthogonal to whether people find print vs video trustworthy or authoritative, which I think is conditioned by what each person grew up considering to be trustworthy or authoritative.
I think there absolutely would be enough if they also covered international stories as well as happier news. There's a whole lot more good going on in the world right now than bad, but for some reason we do not highlight it.
"For some reason" is that people do not watch it.
Once you get a taste of "bad" it dominates.
It's important to remember that actually reporting news is a tertiary purpose of the news business. The primary purpose is to sell advertising. The secondary purpose is to get eyeballs onto their product, in order to facilitate the primary purpose. Reporting news is only done because it's how they've chosen to get those eyeballs.
Maybe for some people, but I see no reason we shouldn't seek out and show good news... I think it makes people happier.
Good news is much easier to fake.
As they say "If it bleeds it leads"
Mentally you tend to equally weigh both good and bad news over a long time span, but negative news gets a much quicker and stronger initial reaction, thus it gets priority. Just an evolutionary trait, don't wait to see if the shadow is a tiger just assume it is about to attack.
This is why social media ends up the way it is, that quick reaction is what the algorithms pick up on even if long term it isn't any different. It is a hard issue to overcome especially when it is a free market race to the bottom.
> There's a whole lot more good going on in the world right now than bad,
I have no clue how you could ever even estimate this sort of ratio. How do you even quantify the "number of things going on", let alone confidently split them into good and bad?
I think that a lot of the issue might be that the "good" is often irrelevant to the user. E.g. Great news! Scientists discover new drug for treating cancer (in mice).
'Good going on', rarely affects my wallet.
And most of the "bad going on" is completely out of your control. People could do with consuming a lot less national/international news.
There are other valid reasons to watch the news though.
They know better than everyone what people watch. Apparently it's not profitable to do in-depth journalism. As someone else in this thread said, the bobble-head analysis is what people watched (past tense, because now they are the "legacy media").
I think it's strongly related to the market for "reaction videos" on youtube, or even the early-2000's VH1 shows where a famous/popular person would react to music videos. Perhaps people want to project their emotions onto an avatar?
I also remember when CNN first appeared. I was a kid, but I recall people (adults, Boomers) sort of rejected it at first. I think there was a trust issue, not just with CNN, but cable-TV in general. But yeah, I recall people thinking CNN was a passing fad, like it would fail in a year or so because people liked/trusted the local broadcasters and network anchors they'd known for most of their lives.
I just remember it as a channel you could bring up that always had the top headlines right now. Yes they would repeat a lot of it every 15-30 minutes but if you didn't want to wait for the national TV news at 6:00pm you could just turn on CNN and feel informed. It was also the start of people getting addicted to the need to know everything all the time, later amplified 100x by the rise of the internet and mobile phones/media. I remember some people getting addicted to CNN, just had it on all the time.
There was CNN and HNN (CNN2 at one point). CNN had more variety of coverage, interviews, etc. HNN was the one that repeated itself every 30 minutes or so (if nothing new came in), it was more like watching the national evening news at essentially any time of day. Then in the '00s they switched over to do more talking head junk.