TSDR
If ratings were the goal -
News networks would all adopt the FoxNews Playbook.
They would rather be activists than have ratings.
All you need to do is look.
Other than airports - no one is watching CNN
No one is watching MSNBC
No idea what "TSDR" is supposed to mean but yes, so-called "news" networks HAVE adopted the Fox Noise model. That's a perfect illustration. Before Roger What-Ailes-Ya bubbled up Fox Noise, CNN was holding the position of news source with its idea of 24 hour coverage so we didn't have to wait for the 6pm network news.
But doing news -- REAL news -- is expensive. You need to hire reporters, fly them around with production crews, trucks, satellite phones, you need to open and maintain foreign bureaus, all that shit. That's why the old traditional Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite network news shows were all subsidized by the mindless Gilligan's Islands and Beverly Hillbillies, because that's where the money was. The newscasts were
loss leaders. Just there for PR so that a given station, come license renewal time, could tell the FCC, "See? We're serving the public interest as the license requires, look at all these news shows".
And of course being on cable, the Foxes and CNNs don't need broadcast licenses anyway so they're relieved of the mandate to operate "in the public interest, convenience and necessity" as licensees are.
Rupert Murdoch, who made his fortune selling sleazy tabloid rags, bubbled up the idea of, instead of spending all that money on actual news, plopping some talking heads down in a studio to talk ABOUT the news, rather than actually report it. MUCH cheaper. He came up with a gossip channel which, instead of gossiping about celebrities, gossips about politicians. It's always about
people, not policy. That's a direct Appeal to Emotion.
Roger Ailes candidly put it this way: "If two guys are on a stage and one guy says 'I know how to bring peace to the Middle East' and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, which one do you think is going to be on the evening news?"
That's why all those garish Romper Room colors festoon the set. That's why the women are all facing the camera in short skirts. That's why all those suggestive chyrons are dancing across the screen. That's why the talking heads are pounding their fists on the desk and speaking in three octaves. All that shit SELLS. Emotion sells. Sex sells. Suggestive shit plants seeds and the colors keep you awake. And then ---- BAM, buy this dick drug. That's the game, Gumball. It's all manipulative psychology.
Commentary --- which is where Fox Noise makes all its money --- is cheap, because as the old maxim says, TALK IS CHEAP.
And that's why ratings exist.
CNN, to its discredit, saw what Fox Noise was doing and adopted some of the same shit. MSNBC came along and switched from its far-right position that Fox already had, to the other side to milk a different audience. ALL of them are in it for the goal of maximizing viewership,
simply because the more hypnotized drones you have, the more you can charge the advertiser for time. Ratings measure
attention. If my network can deliver more eyeballs than yours, then I can charge more for a commercial. Simple as that. How I get those eyeballs could be bimbos in short skirts in a garishly colored studio with suggestive chyrons running amok, it could be naked people on an island forced to eat bugs, it could be here's the results of the paternity tests, it could be dancing with the who-cares. Doesn't matter,
they're all there for the same goal.
THAT, Virginia, is how they work and what they work for. Not ******* "activisim", which makes ZERO money.