how would you fix 24-hour cable news?

Making light? Exploiting for ratings, maybe, but certainly not "making light." He takes the child molesting more seriously than anybody on TV. He basically wants to hang child molesters by their nuts.

As for the question at hand, there is no way to "fix" 24 hour cable news. The ratings are bad enough as it is. Ratings for "NBN" would be in C-SPAN range or lower.

I will say this though. I think CNBC and MSNBC should merge, with the business stuff all day and as many good talking heads as you can get at night. That would probably be the news channel with the most potential.

 

There really needs to be an hour-long "issues" broadcast every night similar to 60 Minutes. Take about 15 minutes of good reporting, 20 minutes of analysis and ther rest of the show for phone calls. Kind of like an expanded version of "Between the Lines." I will give ESPN credit for that one.

We suck at any international reporting not connected to Iraq. We completely have missed the boat on Russia's resurgence, and unless there's a bombing somewhere, we wouldn't know where Europe is on the map. Business reporting is horrible. Little to no depth on Washington reporting, just speculating on the next election cycle.

It's basically, let's beat the shite out of a hot button topic and then go to the next one. It's shallow at best. Unfortunately, that's what our society has become.

 

BBC World is solid. The usual format is a half-hour of hard news (00 to 30), followed by a half-hour interview, or documentary, or magazine show. Sometimes it's two 15-minute segments, especially during London business hours. World weather the last few minutes of each half-hour. Breaking news appears to really be news, as well.

 

Agreed, clerk typist - I'd fix 24-hours news by canceling all those shows and only allowing BBC on air, maybe commission BBC to have a BBC U.S. format.

 

Get rid of 24 hour news. We didn't need it 30 years ago. If they had enough to fill their cycles, we wouldn't be subjected to 'missing white girl of the month,' Jonbenet and the rest of the tabloid crap.

 

The problem with 24-hour news is that these networks don't have the money or manpower to truly fill 24 hours with news, so everything looks stretched out and tarted up.

 

focus on the issues instead of trying to make the issues. ... reporting the news and doing both sides of it. I always thought as journalists, we cover both sides. There were no liberal or conservative. CNN bugs me to death with their liberal views. FOX is sometimes too conservative. Can't we have a middle ground? To me that would be a great way to innovate news on television? What do you think?

 

Whoever said that there's nowhere near enough news to fill up 24 hours, they're darn right.

CNN was at its best 10 years ago, when it was balanced -- Moneyline, before Lou Dobbs decided to rant on border safety shit 24/7, was a really good business news show. Late-night hours were filled with sports stuff, which provided fresh material and allowed a different audience to be exposed to the network. CNN Headline News also was wicked good, too, in the sense that you knew when what was coming up. Want stocks? Tune in at :15 and :45. Want sports? Tune in at :20 and :50.

But, as someone else said, it's all about ratings. Think any of these companies care about quality of product? The post-9/11 gravitas dissipated, quickly.

 

Not only is there not enough news to fill up 24 hours, there's just not a big enough demand for it either.

If you want to stay in business, you've got to meet demand. There's a big enough demand for business news on weekdays, talking heads to digest news and entertain on weeknights, and live sports on weekends. So why not create a channel with all those elements? (It's not a well known fact, but CNBC's original plan was to air sports on weekends.)

Throw in regular news updates on the half hour and the ability to cut into regular programming for truly newsworthy breaking events, and you've got a winner.

 

And their experiment with golf, which you would figure would fit in nicely with their target demo, tanked.

 

EMP blast at 60 miles altitude.

 

Relatively speaking, maybe, but compared to their current weekend programming?

And how many people even knew about it? You've got to stick with it and complement it with other stuff to make it destination viewing.