Why I Watch the Network Nightly News

Someone asked me the other day why--in an era of mulitple 24 hour news channels--I make it a point most nights to watch one of the major networks' (usually NBC's) 6:30 PM nightly newscasts. After all, I can get news anytime I want from FoxNews, MSNBC, CNN, or even the Internet.

I found the answer succinctly given in an article I was reading on the Cincinnati Enquirer's website yesterday. It was an article about Joe the Plumber's rise to fame, and the fact that--in a different era--his 15 minutes of fame would likely have been a LITERAL 15 minutes in length. Here's what the article said:

Assuming that he hadn't been embraced and featured by the McCain-Palin campaign, Joe the Plumber's story would have faded quickly in the era before bloggers and around-the-clock news programs existed to keep it alive, said [Kelly] McBride [at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies].

"It used to be that one of the natural regulators of the news was the amount of space there was to tell the news," she said. "That is not the case anymore. We all have infinite space."

And that's why I watch the nightly news, because the network newscasts do not have "infinite space." They're only 30 minutes in length, and if you cut out the numerous drug commercials probably only 20 minutes in length. I know that in 20 minutes I'm not going to get a lot of filler news, just the important stuff. A lot times, in fact, I only watch the news until the first commercial break because I know what comes after on a slow day isn't very important, either.

Tonight I assume the news will be much longer than 30 minutes, and there will be a lot of filler as the newscasters twiddle away the hours waiting for election results to come in. But tonight is the exception to the rule. Tomorrow we'll be back to sensible news, 30 (20) minutes in length.

Just the facts, ma'am. Just the facts.