You have to understand that people are tuning into CNN all day because they want entertainment and company. People sitting at home during the day with nothing else to do but watch cable news aren't looking for hard-hitting analysis and dry reporting of facts. They want to feel like a friend is talking to them. They want to be entertained and occupied. That's what emotional reporting, tragedy porn, focus on human stories (i.e. on Snowden's escape rather than the NSA leaks), and sensationalist criminal trials is all about. Sorry to say it, but the people who actually appreciate quality journalism aren't sitting at home during a weekday afternoon watching CNN. They have other things to do, and they get their news online.

It's a business and the average viewer just wants to be entertained at home. They are on 24/7. You can't compare CNN to BBC or Al-Jazeera because both are subsidized. If they lived or died by their Nielsen score, it'd be another story.

Edit: I'm not condoning CNN's execution as of late. They've taken a decided turn for the worst since former NBC head Jeff Zucker took over. He ruined NBC and somehow got the CNN gig and he's rapidly destroyed what little quality remained at CNN. I really wonder how the corporate world works sometimes.

Thanks for probably the most insightful comment here, including mine.

> I really wonder how the corporate world works sometimes.

Well I do. What the corporate world wants is growth. Growth at the expense of anything and everything else. And if that 3% boost is going to come at the expense of turning the entire network into light entertainment and celebrities, then well - bonus time!

I am not a communist. But I have recently begun to perceive large swathes of the free market as being a mere race to best pander to the worst aspects of the human condition; fast food and celebrity news. And you might say, the market is giving people what they want - I say, not what I want, and not what they need.

Ask a child what they want for dinner and it might be milkshakes. Milkshakes for breakfast lunch and dinner. That is our news and that is what the free market delivers us. Tell me that adults are different and I invite you to examine the diabetes rates. Tell me that at least an elite intellectual class clings on somehow and I will tell you their votes count the same as someone who cannot even spell democracy and they outnumber us 10 to 1 if not more.

I don't know what the solution is but I think we have come too far. And I think governments should provide news channels. Television is 50% education.

don't mean to quote from the book of Jobs, but he had a fitting answer:

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

The problem is not the system per se, but the participants. We have a market system where most people are driven by the market, instead of driving the market. Meaning, most people/companies look to the market to see what 'works' and just do that, instead of contributing something new to the marketplace and creating real progress.

It's very embarrassing that this is the kind of news reporting that accumulates wide viewership in America. Rather than learning anything, we'd prefer to just be wowed with an explosion.

I'm really hoping that Al Jazeera's US campaign is at least a moderate success, but I'm not holding my breath. It'll give some much needed variation in reporting, or so I hope. Likely it will be viewed about as widely as BBC America, or less.

http://america.aljazeera.com/

Ah, it's not just america, although us subjects of the Queen may like to pretend it is.

What all the good news programs have in common is that their natures are dictated by an authority, not by the free market.

Make of that what you will.

Make what you will also, but BBC Turkish has been one of the very few neutral and dependable news sources in the entire Turkish Gezi events. They did their job so well they earned insults from Prime Minister Erdogan and Mayor of Ankara, both calling the reporter on ground, Selin Girit, "a whore committing treason". Which gave BBC Turkish a spotlight they ran with—they deserve it.

Well played BBC.

On the Israel/Palestine topic, both sides claim the BBC unfairly represents the other. That's pretty good going if you ask me!

> Make of that what you will.

We clearly need a Ministry of Truth.

Well maybe we bloody well do.

What have we got now?

I suspect you missed the reference.

I suspect she didn't.

"accumulates wide viewership in America."

LOL wide viewership LOL!

google for CNN ratings and the first link I found is a press release from exactly one week ago "proudly" reporting that CNN's "New Day" program from 6 to 9 am (presumably EDT?) had a whopping 302,000 viewers.

google "united states population" claims 313.9 million, but thats not counting illegals so we'll call it a cool third of a billion.

WAY over 99% of the population is doing something other than watching CNN.

You're getting pretty far down in the weeds, getting comparable to if you asked a random person on the street, the odds of them having the same birthday as you, or they watched CNN this morning, are vaguely similar to more than a sig fig.

By comparison, the mighty GOOG combined with some basic arithmetic gives the result that "about" 125 times more people watched the superbowl than watched CNN this morning. Still only about 1/3 of the population, but getting closer to broadcasting and "wide viewership".

Its a great example of extreme narrowcasting, not broadcasting and certainly not "wide viewership". Nobody watches that stuff, they just don't culturally matter anymore. Only rare and unusual oddballs (nothing personal intended) watch TV news networks.

They appeal to the 'mainstream audience', not techies or even the smarter half of the population.

Not true at all. Look up the actual viewing figures. Less than 1% of the population watches CNN's morning news show. They most intentionally do NOT broadcast to the 'mainstream audience'. Careers are made and broken by appealing to perhaps 1% of the population (or 0.5%...) rather than the current 0.9% or so.

Its a mix of HN elitism combined with gross over estimation of cultural impact WRT a cultural icon that doesn't matter anymore.

They do not broadcast to the mainstream, they try to steal away fractions of a percent of weirdo daytime news network junkies from other networks, not boost viewership from the 99% of "normal" people who don't watch that kind of thing.

Its like top40 music or hollywood movies in that way.

You seem to confuse sample size with sampling error. Sure, only 1% (or whatever) of the population watches CNN. That doesn't mean the 1% watching the channel is not an average, mainstream viewer.

It can actually be that the average CNN viewer is exactly like the average person in United States. I don't think that's true, but I don't think the typical viewer is that far from the average.

I find that incredibly unlikely. I agree that the very small number of people who watch "sy fy" channel could be a perfect cross section of humanity, but that's not likely.

The appeal level is extremely low (99% of the population would rather do anything else) and the barrier to entry is extremely low (its marginal cost is "free" if you have cable and a tv, and how hard is it to turn on a TV?) and the marketing is extensive (who in the USA has never heard of CNN before?) The content is highly formulaic and repetitive, typical characteristics of things that only appeal to a small minority.

There are numerous business scenarios I can think of where a perfectly mainstream biz model fails because of problems with at least one of the above, but CNN and daytime news networks in general have no such excuse, they're just not mainstream anymore than sy fy channel or tennis channel is mainstream.

(Warning, this will sound extremely elitist.)

I'd argue that the "smart" portion of the population is even less than you figure. It depends on what you interpret to be smart. With my own personal judgment, intelligence, true intelligence, is derived from skepticism, curiosity, and a thirst for knowledge, not by success financially.

If we use those criteria, I'd say that most people in that list would be about 1/8th down on the bell curve. People just don't care, I've seen it with my own family.

I would guess that half their viewership is in the smarter half. Remember that many people don't watch the news at all. I'll just leave you with that depressing reminder and go back to trying to have hope for the world.

Many smart people, or at least HN types, prefer not to watch the news.

(And FWIW as much as we love to complain about the newspapers I find TV news, even on the BBC, is the worst form of news reporting out there)

I've found that watching almost any form of news -- in the United States -- is a complete waste of time, and even a hinderince to my own personal happiness.

What is it you think an anchor is exactly? Mostly they are just a pretty face with a good voice who is sufficiently trained to read off a screen and not screw up. As a rule they tend not to be well-rounded intellectuals.

Watch the HBO show The Newsroom. It is quite depressing.

Yeah I thought that was just disrespectful. Thousands of hours were put into those satellites by scientists and the only thing they can say is that there's a neat explosion...

Had to mute the video to manage to finish watching it. Where do they find this kind of "talent" these days? Sounds like they're breaking into Entertainment Tonight.