You do know there are more news providers than CNN or Faux?
Not really. There are basically no news providers, plenty of agenda peddlers but not news. They wouldn't make it.
News and money used to be separate. The news departments broke even at best, and had wonderful autonomy from upstairs offices.
Of course that is no longer true, and hasn't been for several decades.
60 minutes was the first news show that began to make real money. This immediately drew interest from bean counters everywhere. And from that day forward, news disappeared.
"Network" news was always a loss leader. When such TV programs existed to disseminate actual news they were subsidized by the sitcoms that followed them later in the evening. They only existed at all because FCC requires as a condition of license that they serve their community with some kind of programming "in the public interest", and such news programming would be what the licensee would point to at renewal time. Along with the 5am farm market report and the city council meeting conveniently telecast at 3am on Wednesday.
"60 Minutes" was (is) a
magazine, not a news program. Profiles of people and issues. That's more profitable than straight news --- especially when you give it a prime time slot like Sunday early evening. But that's not what morphed "news" into "whatever we have now".
CNN was the first outlet to try to make news a round-the-clock affair for an increasingly fast-paced world and its specious concept of "immediacy in everything". And it worked out OK in that if one wanted the news outside the old standard hours, it was there.
In the mid-'90s Rupert Murdoch, who had built a fortune selling sleazy tabloid newspapers around the world, brought that sensibility to television, creating Fox News Channel.
Doing real news is an expensive proposition -- it requires flying people around the world, satellite phones and remote satellite trucks, running foreign news bureaus worldwide, and producers who can stream all of what comes in into a coherent presentation. Fox Noise evaded all that by creating not a news channel but a channel
about the news already in. Instead of flying people everywhere and streaming original content, they plunked talking heads in a studio to talk
about stories and their implications. One guy pounding his fist on a camera is way cheaper than teams of bureaus and satellites and airplane tickets.
"News" -- as in genuine news, a simple neutral what-where-who-when report, doesn't particularly "sell", nor is it supposed to. But
emotion sells like proverbial hotcakes. Fear and loathing, and anger, and dystopian despair will
always draw eyeballs. Murdoch understood this from his daze selling trashy tabloids and applied it to TV, creating basically a gossip channel that, instead of gossip about celebrities purveyed gossip about politicians. It even pulled Bill O'Reilly from another network's gossip-about-celebrities hack show to be one of its talking heads.
And the Fox Noise model is
always about emotion --- always centered on people rather than policy, always dressed up in garishly colored studio sets to grab the eye, always displaying Barbie-doll women in miniskirts, always whooshing suggestive chyrons across the screen. All of this is psychological manipulation to grab eyeballs and keep them tuned in (the fear factor -- "we'll be back to tell you how Barack O'bama, scary black man, booga booga, is coming to take your guns after this word for Viagra"). All of that is designed, meticulously, to build ratings because ratings mean ad dollars. Of course in that scenario the first casualty in the quest for profit is Truth.
That ^^ is where news morphed into emotional bullshit, my friend. And CNN, to its eternal discredit, followed Fox Noise down the same hole in the same quest for profit.
That's basically why profit motive and truth are mutually exclusive. The former will always bend the latter to its will.
