And there's something to be said about BBC World News' basic format for
most of their weekday hours--25 minutes of news, quick weather summary at
:26, headlines at the bottom of the hour, business to :40, another longer
weather summary, sports from :43 to :52, features at :53 ("Click" on
technology, "FastTrack" on travel, "Talking Movies" on--you know) until
it's almost top of the hour and time for one of the countdown videos to get
them back to news again. And no biovators or celebrity gossip, although
they are suckers for cute animal videos.
Mark Jeffries
Saints Spotlight Editor
[email protected]
On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 1:19 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 3:58 AM, Steve Timko <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 8:01 PM, Kevin M. <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> But all the news outlets minimize the facts to make
>>>
>> room for idle opinion that has no place on a network that has the word
>>> "news" in its title. I can't be the only one who remembers when an
>>> anchor daring to proffer an opinion would only do so if a graphic
>>> flashed underneath him with the word "EDITORIAL" in large, bold
>>> letter. Cut to the present day, and if such a graphic was still used,
>>> it would never be off the screen.
>>>
>>>
>> The problem as I see it is that the cable news does present the facts.
>> And then they've got a whole afternoon or evening of air time to fill. So
>> to fill the dead air they use opinion and speculation.
>> When something important is happening live, cable news is at its best.
>> This has been evident since the first gulf war. When it has dead air to
>> fill, cable news is the worst journalism in America. Worse than the
>> tabloids. Remember how the cable networks became the Chandra Levy channels
>> in 2001 until 9/11 knocked her off the screen. And none of their
>> speculation was on target.
>>
>> What I would like to see is an explanation of which viewers CNN lost. I
>> think they're losing a good chunk of news junkies who know get their fixes
>> via Twitter or their smartphones or through the Internet.
>> I don't think Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer is really a top notch kind
>> of news personality, the kind that hold viewers. So I suspect they're also
>> experiencing fatigue as viewers drift away from them.
>>
>
> I don't understand your premise; are you saying that there is only 20
> minutes worth of news to report each day, and the rest of the time is
> filler? The contrary seems obviously true - If CNN would really focus on
> reporting the news, they could do 20 minutes of headlines at the top of
> each hour, and do 20 minutes of interviews and 20 minutes of what NewsHour
> calls "backrounders" providing context and depth to one of the stories of
> the day. If I were in charge of CNN the majority of their hours would look
> something like that.
>
> Like any newspaper, they could also have a few sections (hours) devoted to
> various features (celebrities, finance, health - and when CNN did real
> sports they did it pretty well, why not bring that back?), and I could see
> a couple of hours in the evening devoted to personality driven current
> events opinion shows (the best suggestion I have seen online today is to
> roll up a truck of money to Rachel Maddow's house and offer whatever it
> takes to get her to jump to CNN when her contract expires; do something
> similar for Newt Gingrich (or whoever), fluff and buff Cooper and replace
> Blitzer with someone who can credibly anchor a straight newscast (I would
> go with one of the second gen NewsHour anchors - my favorite is Ray Suarez,
> but I guess that would be seen as too ideological by some. Maybe Lara
> Logan?)
>
> Obviously, if I ran CNN it would have even lower ratings than it does
> today - and of course that is the problem. A news operation driven as much
> by ratings as the cable so-called news channels are will inevitably sink to
> the bottom; CNN's problem is that they got beat to the most popular
> bottoms, and are now feeding in less popular zones.
>
> --
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