All Intensive Purposes

Oh my. You realize this blows this thing wide open? CNN is going down. The America I know simply won't stand for this kind of thing.
 

What you guys need is a news service not reliant on pleasing advertisers via audience delivery . . . like PBS . . . or the BBC . . .
 

Does the BBC feel immune to the pressure to sensationalize things to compete with other alternatives?
 

Tyrone - they went through a period in the 80s/90s when they obviously were trying to compete with the commercial network, and news values suffered accordingly. Things have since noticably improved. The problem they have now is that they've been beaten up by the govt over the reporting of the WMD dossier in 2003 & are clearly not immune to the pressure to downplay some things.
 

I think that the effect of CNN and FOX in shaping public opinion in this country is far out of proportion to the size of their audience -- there are not that many people watching them, compared to other sources of news, but they are very influential with the few people who have a television on all the time and who tell other people what is going on. So, notwithstanding what I've said above, simple economics can't explain all of this. I hardly ever watch TV news, and when I listen to the radio, I'm listening to National Public Radio.