Funny. There used to be, back when CNN was a news network...

Did there used to be? Or did CNN function more like a utility, something between what it is now and the Weather Channel, which is how I remember it? Because it's not that you can't stand up The Weather Channel But For News; it's that you can't compete with Fox and MSNBC doing that.

Even then, not really. Most of the time they had 4-6 hours of actual programming that they just repeated.

This is what I remember. They had basically an hourly rotation of segments, and every once in a while they would update them. But if you had watched for 2 hours, there was a pretty good chance that a lot of the second hour was completely repeated.

I'm skeptical. The "C" in CNN is sort of the giveaway that there was never really any legitimacy there.

Am I picking on cable as a whole, suggesting it was always a profit-driven entity that runs counter to level-headed news reporting? I guess I am.

And I'll defend the "big three" networks that existed before cable because news was only a small portion of their broadcast schedule. I don't think the networks objected to Walter Cronkite (etc.) being the loss-leading face to represent their corporate integrity.

Nah, same amount of news, way less competition for eyeballs back then. CNN had its best commercial times when the Internet was still very small.

For years, if something important happened in the middle of the day, CNN was kind of it, in terms of finding out what was going on quickly. If it was REALLY big, the networks might break into their daytime programming, but that was a very high bar.

To be fair, CNN’s heyday was mostly centered around the major international crises between the end of the Cold War (“the end of history”) and major uptake of the internet. Similar events would be treated as a “slow news day” today, because the audience only cares about international news when it suits them. Their major domestic coverage of the LA riots would set better precedent for a US audience, except everyone is either inured to the exaggeration of non-news to that proportion or acutely aware that news of that proportion like mass violence is barely reported at all.

> There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill 24/7.

There isn't enough CHEAP stuff to report to fill 24/7 that isn't toxic partisan garbage.

There is plenty of "real" news. But it takes real money to go dig it up and put it together.

>There simply isn't enough real stuff to report to fill 24/7.

Sure there is. There is so much news for one day that it's impossible to get it all. If 8 billion people are awake for 10 hours each day. You have 80 billion hours of people's experiences to compresses into only 24 hours.

We're getting hung up on semantics. The parent comment said "real stuff". I said "interesting news". People took issue with both terms. But that's fine: substitute whichever term you'd like for content sufficiently attractive to make CNN competitive. The strategy Fox and MSNBC use to accomplish this --- and, again, bear in mind that their audiences are relatively pathetic, even when they're successful! --- is obvious: turning the news into a sporting event. The NYT uses another strategy: they're a broader entertainment platform, not solely reliant on the news, and have a significant cohort of subscribers who don't even care about the news. But CNN can't really do that, either.

There is an ungodly amount of editorial content that could be done on every single corporate/government scandal, collusion, bribery, corruption, you name it -- which happens on a 24/7 basis. You could fill a month with the food industry alone. Let alone chemical companies.

There is a mindboggling amount of shit that is completely and utterly ignored, or suppressed, or normalized as "business as usual".

But it's not profitable for a CNN to report on this, not because they wouldn't get eyeballs and viewers, but because the tightly enmeshed corporate stakeholders of the world in and around the infotainment sector wouldn't want it to happen.

I do a lot of local political stuff, and am acquainted with people doing serious local political corruption and mismanagement and scandal journalism, and I think you'd be surprised how small the audience is for that stuff. CNN isn't avoiding this stuff because they're part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth; they're avoiding it because it's ratings death. Which is what you're saying! But they're a business, not a public service, so that's the end of the story.

How about “real, interesting stuff that appeals to more than 2 people”.

With skilled enough story telling a writer can make most things appeal to a mass audience.

What does "skilled enough" mean? Do you have any examples that demonstrate this?