News is like any other media. It's a war for viewers. If the news platforms were not successful they would change. It looks like you have been outvoted Denny by other viewers who watch opinion oriented news. And you can't tell me that Fox, a 24/7 Trump Ad, isn't doing the same thing.
CBS for decades funded its news programs at a loss. That's what made them credible in the first place.
I have every bit an issue with Fox News as I do with CNN, though they make a much clearer distinction between their news programs (Brett Baier, etc.) and their TV talk shows (Hannity).
http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/whatever-happened-news
In the early 1960s the networks, hugely profitable but worried about their images and about regulatory pressures, expanded their news operations and largely freed them from the pressures of commercial television. The "church" of news was to be separated from the "state" of entertainment.
In the 1970s and '80s, however, the barrier between news and entertainment has been increasingly eroded. Not all the changes of these years have been for the worse. But taken together, they raise serious questions about the future of journalism in an entertainment-dominated medium. A recent edition of the news tabloid
A Current Affair, for example, ended with the tease "Coming up – sex, murder and videotape, that's next!" It may be that this is indeed the future of television news.
It was the local stations that first discovered, late in the 1960s, that news could make money– lots of money. By the end of the '70s, news was frequently producing 60 percent of a station's profits. With numbers like that, news was much "too important" to leave to journalists, and a heavily entertainment-oriented form of programming began to evolve. Often it was contrasted directly with the network news. 'Feel like you're getting a bad deal from poker-faced TV news reporters?" asked San Francisco's KGO in one ad, "Then let the Channel 7 Gang deal you in. They're not afraid to be friendly."
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The main vehicle for serious public affairs coverage, meanwhile, remains the network evening news, which is widely seen as having betrayed the values of the so-called Golden Age of Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley. This view is not entirely accurate: like many "golden" ages, television's early years have been very much romanticized.
...the drive for ratings has produced many troubling practices, from the furious pace of modem news to a tendency for journalists to scramble like politicians onto the bandwagon of the latest wave of popular sentiment. In the mid-1980s the fashionable emotion was patriotism. Today it is often the evils of drugs. Poker-faced objectivity gives way to breathless moralism, as long as the issue is safe. The danger is both that passion will be inflated at the expense of understanding and that the public agenda will be distorted, with emotional issues blown up larger than life and less dramatic but equally serious ones diminished.
In the long run, there is reason for concern not only about the quality of the evening news, but even its survival. The networks expanded news programs to 30 minutes to begin with, and affiliate stations carried them, not because it was profitable but because they were a regulated industry and wanted the prestige of belonging to the Fourth Estate.
