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