What's a half-hour of CNN Headline News? Fluff and ads. It's no wonder that those two go together so well. It's rough to blame people's lack of interest in in-depth or depressing news, but that's kinda pushed on us as an excuse by advertisers; "people don't want to watch boring or sad stuff on our channel" equals "we can't get advertisers with our numbers." Fluff gets viewers, so TV news pushes it more, lest they get killed for low ratings. If advertisers would value the smaller numbers of news-seekers and pay more for it, there wouldn't be a problem. On the other hand, long-format, intelligent news takes more time to produce, something a 24-hour news network doesn't have. The internet at least lets you link together a bunch of related quick-form news into a single unit; TV news is there and gone. I'm surprised that there's less talk about the internet killing TV news.
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