How have 24 hour news networks improved the telling of the news?

[Purple Squirrel]

Or have they?

[Mac]

CNN gives instant access to information. When news break, no need to wait for the morning newspaper, just turn on the TV and watch the event unfold live. You could also watch the event on the web, but CNN is a huge news organization with many reporters.

[ANDRE L]

They've made it far, far worse.

First of all, they do rather little actual news. Watch any cable news channel and you'll see the same report recycled every hour, if not every half hour. Then, after a couple of such reports, the people on the set will yack with other people on the set, or, occasionally, with people elsewhere facing another TV camera, who know no more than the anchors don't know.

This past week's events in Boston highlighted the total futility of both cable news, and of the Internet & Twitter in trying to get actual information, as opposed to many times re-tweeted/re-broadcast factless speculations, 99%+ of which proved to be absolutely wrong.

In order to do 24 hours of actual news, one needs a major news organisation, with many trained and experienced reporters, doing lots of source checking and fact checking before they put out a story. They need massive resources to support their work, as news happens everywhere, so you'd need to be able to have news bureaus on the ground, already dialed into the regions where they are, all of the time.

But, in this world of conglomerate our-stock-needs-to-go-up-every-five-minutes, such resources aren't made available to do this work. So, we get 15 minutes of actual news, buried by 23 hours and 45 minutes of clueless bullsh*t per day. The problem is, you can't tell which items are a part of the 15 minutes of news. They all sound quite alike.

When there's a fast breaking news event going on, leave the TV on in case there are any interesting things to look at. But, keep the sound off, and wait until a newspaper (Not the NY Post) is ready to put it's name on the line for the story.

All New Media does is vastly increase the flow of offal.