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Chapter 4 -- the Cable News Wars: Another Approach to Popularizing Commercial News

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Chapter 4 -- The Cable News Wars: Another Approach to Popularizing Commercial News The recession that began in 2008 has spurred or accelerated very significant, perhaps crippling, economic troubles in most sectors of the news industry. According to the Pew Center‟s annual State of the News Media report, most major commercial news formats, including local television news broadcasts, network news divisions, news magazines, and especially daily newspapers, experienced declining revenues in 2008 and 2009.1 Media companies also made steep divestures in the newsroom budgets in these news formats. Many analysts suspect these retrenchments are not only the effects of the financial downturn generally; rather, the core business models that have supported commercial journalism appear to be faltering in a media environment undergoing fundamental transformation in the digital age. Yet, one kind of commercial news outlet that did not face declining revenues in the midst of recession: cable news stations. Cable news is a puzzling genre in many respects. It straddles a line between a “traditional” news format and something new. Given that much discussion about the future of news pivots on a distinction between traditional news models and new media emerging in a landscape reshaped by digital and social media, where does cable news fit? Is it a harbinger of things to come or a last gasp of an increasingly obsolete news model trying to find relevance? Like most of the traditional news outlets, the most popular cable news stations are all owned by major media conglomerates, rely on professional journalists for most of their newsgathering (if not their commentary), and, at least for now, the majority of their programming embraces some 1 Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media (Washington, D.C.: Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009), http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/index.htm; Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media (Washington, D.C.: Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010), http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/. claim to fairness and balance.2 Furthermore, cable news programming still shares many basic elements in common with local television news and network news -- from frequent shots of anchors behind desks to the use of many of the same kinds of soundbites and live shots.3 Yet cable news differs in other respects from legacy news organizations. The medium itself is far younger than broadcast journalism. Ted Turner‟s CNN launched in 1980, but it was not until 1996 that MSNBC and Fox News launched to spur serious competition in the U.S. cable news market. Cable as a medium isn‟t simply newer; it has been articulated to different kinds of audiences and programming strategies than broadcast television.4 As many television scholars have argued, the multi-channel environment of cable has meant a potential for fracturing the monolithic “mass” audience associated with the heyday of network television into a system that focuses on targeting distinct niches. While cable news has borrowed many conventions from other news media, it has also been cultivating its own forms of news storytelling, some of which are in pointed opposition to the objective style that characterized 20th Century print and broadcast journalism. The most prominent most prominent markers of cable news‟s difference from broadcast news has been its prime-time programming. As I will discuss later in the chapter, cable news hosts such as Bill O‟Reilly, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Keith Olbermann have crafted their personas in contrast to network news anchors. Even CNN‟s Anderson Cooper, who eschews the partisan identity associated with MSNBC and Fox News, is promoted by CNN as a “fast-moving, surprising and provocative alternative to the typical network evening newscast.” (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/). 2 Interestingly, the term “objectivity” appears less frequently in discussions about cable news. Perhaps “objectivity” connotes a bland neutrality that cable news is trying to distance itself from while its journalists still seek to lay claim to some form of professional grasp on truthfulness and comprehensiveness in their coverage. 3Some cable hosts have been moving away from the anchor-behind-the-desk convention. CNN‟s Wolf Blitzer, in particular, has penchant for standing during his show and moving around the studio to point at maps, charts, graphs, and even the occasional hologram. 4 Amanda D Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007). The relative economic success of cable news suggests these channels might be setting a path that other commercial news media will follow. This raises the question of whether the kind of journalism associated with cable news contributes to a healthy democratic media. Many journalists and critics believe cable news has been exerting a strong influence over the rest of the news media, but many believe cable news‟s influence has become a negative one. During the earlier years of CNN, the reaction to cable news from the community of professional journalists seemed to be somewhat skeptical overall, but nonetheless they engaged in a rather balanced debate over the merits of twenty-four hours news.5 Yet after the competition among these stations became heated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, more critics saw cable news as detrimental in its impact on democracy.6 Even President Obama has singled out cable news and its particular demands on the “twenty-four hour news cycle” as harmful force for U.S. political culture. A reoccurring refrain has been that these cable stations have developed in a way that has squandered the democratic potential cable news once held. Cable news stations have much more time to tell news stories and offer description and analysis of current events than television broadcasters who reserved only a small portion of the day for news. Despite its 24 hours a day airtime, cable stations have gained a reputation for focusing more than intensely than other sources on a few big stories rather than offering breadth. The Pew Center‟s State of the Media Reports provides evidence to support this perception, and their research also suggests that in 2010 cable news focused much more exclusively on domestic U.S. stories than other types of news media.7 The 2010 report also found that even though cable stations had branded 5 Media Institute, Cnn Vs. the Networks--Is More News Better News?: A Content Analysis of the Cable News Network and the Three Broadcast Networks, Media research series (Washington, D.C: Media Institute, 1983). 6 For example, see Neil Hickey, “Cable Wars.,” Columbia Journalism Review 41, no. 5 (January 2003): 12. 7 Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media. themselves in opposition to one another, “the basic menu of the top subject matter covered on the three cable channels was relatively similar.”8 In this chapter I explore major strategies cable news stations have used to gain audiences and popularity. The argument I make is that the form of news storytelling that has thrived on cable stations has been shaped to a large degree by an evolving common sense among industry players about what their audiences want, a sense I refer to as “the industry popular.” I analyze several of the key intuitions among cable news producers about what they need to do to compete for audiences and make their programs appealing and profitable. My purpose is not only to describe defining features of cable news, but also to offer the concept of the industry popular as an alternative to technological, market, or cultural determinism for making sense of why cable news have adopted their restricted range of current programming strategies. In referring to other modes of determinism, I want to suggest that neither cable‟s technological capacities, nor the “market” (taking the market as simply a system in which producers compete to make the most profit meeting consumer demand), nor a general sense of U.S. “culture” can, by themselves, account for the distinctive innovations of cable news. The focus of my analysis is on the prime- time programming that has emerged since MSNBC and Fox News launched to compete with CNN in 1996. The reasons I focus on prime-time programming after 1996 is because it is this programming that has been the object of cable news stations most intense efforts to win over audiences. Even though the prime-time programming differs significantly from the daytime programming on all stations, it is the prime-time programming that has been primarily tasked with establishing a brand image for each channel and securing a daytime audience. In what follows, I first propose the concept of the “industry popular” and discuss its connection with the framework introduced at the beginning of this dissertation as well as its 8 Ibid., http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/year_sectorhighlights.php#cable. special relevance for understanding cable news. Second, I provide a very brief history of CNN and the model it had set for cable news programming before the launch of competing U.S. cable news channels. Third, in the most central section of this chapter, I analyze five key dimensions of the industry popular for cable news – five attributes of cable news programs that have been widely accepted as essential for its popularization. Lastly, I conclude by bringing this analysis of cable news into a discussion about the popularization of news in general and the central themes of this dissertation. Approaching the Industry Popular Let‟s say, hypothetically, that cable news programming over the last decade has become increasingly targeted toward specific niche audiences segmented by political affiliation. This has become a prevalent notion among certain media critics, and although I will question this hypothesis later in the chapter, it serves as a concrete example of the kind of problem this chapter explores.
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