To echo your point, there was an Aspen festival panel a few years ago where a network news rep/owner was refreshingly honest. He said everyone thinks they want

To echo your point, there was an Aspen festival panel a few years ago where a network news rep/owner was refreshingly honest. He said everyone thinks they want the news to be deeply insightful and informative, but the people who would consume that product tend to go out nights and do interesting things like attend ballets or go to museums, or go to things like the aspen festival. Or at least they are just reading a few articles online. They make news for the sort of people who just binge television news constantly. These people don't have a custom rss feed to make that efficient, and that is a special type of person. "We run the market test against PBS every night." If PBS started hitting numbers, every other station would jump to that model immediately.