Editorials & Other Articles

Newsjock

(11,733 posts) Thu Aug 23, 2012, 11:12 PM Aug 2012

'The challenge for cable news,' by (yes) David Frum

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/23/opinion/frum-cable-news/index.html

... Things move fast in the modern world, so let's cut straight to the point: Cable TV is no longer the place where news breaks, and has not been so for years. Social media have done to cable TV news what cable news, in its day, did to the afternoon editions of big-city papers: shouldered aside its slower and less adaptable predecessor.

... 1) Accept that the days of "the news is the star" are over. Generic news moves too fast for cable. Nobody will tune to a cable news network unless there is a very compelling reason to tune to that specific network at that particular time. There's only one such reason: "People like to watch the people they like to watch." Everything else is just filler. Like it or not, TV is for personality, not only for information.

2) Go upmarket. Cable news is inescapably a niche market. There are 311 million people in the United States. Even at peak hours, 306 million of them are not watching cable news. At nonpeak hours, 309 million of them are not watching cable news. The 2 million- to 5 million-person cable news audience is made up of unusually smart and curious people, and they should be served appropriate content. The people who can be reached by "dumbing down" TV have already been successfully reached by the Kardashian family.

3) Go deep and long. "'Time, time,' said old King Tut, 'is something I ain't got anything but.'" That funny little poem by Don Marquis also aptly describes cable news. It's got acres and acres of time to fill, 52 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As it is, cable news treats that time as a problem to be overcome with sound and visual effects intended to create a feeling (almost always false) of immediacy and urgency. Those effects long ago lost their credibility.

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'The challenge for cable news,' by (yes) David Frum (Original Post) Newsjock Aug 2012 OP

Frum is one of the few conservatives worth paying attention to BlueStreak Aug 2012 #1

BlueStreak

(8,377 posts)

1. Frum is one of the few conservatives worth paying attention to

Reply to Newsjock (Original post)

Thu Aug 23, 2012, 11:45 PM

Aug 2012

There used to be quite a few principled conservatives who presented well-thought-out, challenging, adult arguments. People like William Buckley and William Rusher.

Today's conservatives operate with the intellectual sophistication (and emotional maturity) of third-graders.

Although this is a short column by Frum, I think he makes good points. I don't get much from point#1. Points 2 and 3 seem to be a good starting point for a discussion.

He really isn't in a position where he could speak the truth, saying "Fox is different from the others. They are strictly a propaganda network." But I think he understands that better than most, because those are the people who have more-or-less blacklisted him because -- well, because he isn't a third-grader willing to treat every subject as a food fight.

I think his advice might make good sense for CNN. He doesn't mention there is already one network "going long" in his terms, and that is NPR. But there ought to be room for an adult level of presentation that perhaps isn't quite as arduous as NPR.

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