News Channels Are Becoming Entertainment Today

In an era of global technology, instant news, infomercials, electronic town meetings, and “Made for TV Documentaries,” the borderlines between news and analysis, news and entertainment, news and fiction are constantly shifting.

Broadcasting is media programming that focuses on many genres of television. For instance, on a broadcasting channel, you can watch a drama, comedy, and news all in the same day. The three broadcasting networks, known as “The Big 3”, are ABC, NBC, and CBS. When these broadcasting channels present news, they want to stay as close to the middle of the political spectrum as possible. The goal of a broadcasting channel is to appeal to everyone and the more neutral, fact-based information released, the more views “The Big 3” will get, resulting in more money. However, narrowcasting is media programming that is focused on a particular audience. Examples of narrowcasting networks include C-SPAN, ESPN, Fox News, and CNN. ESPN stands for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network so they specialize in sports news and cater to the sports audience. Unlike broadcasting, narrowcasting will not try to appeal to the majority of Americans, so it can lean left or right on political issues and interject slightly more opinions.

Press, media, news, and entertainment today are used to both influence, shape and mold our minds. Whether it is politics, fashion, sports, conflicts, or finance the way and how it makes it's way to the people is very important. The perspective and delivery of the news determines if the message will come off as propaganda, gossip, or informative. News can be both a positive and negative weapon given the impact that is has on the minds, views and behavior of the people who are consuming it. The impacts and effects of the news can either unite a group of people or separate them. Although

TV news viewership has declined steadily over the past two decades. Several factors may have contributed to the decline: busy lifestyles, lack of interest, and the rise of the Internet. As viewership has declined, the remaining viewers have aged. Today, the average evening news viewer is 60 years old. TV networks' response to these changes has largely been negative. They have dropped hard news in favor of opinion pieces, "puff pieces," and stories that are of interest only to their older demographic. As a result, TV news has not just become unpopular, it has also become largely worthless.

The public can now have a say in what they see, and this differs from ‘old guard newsrooms.’ Liquid journalism is intertwined, being a very fluctuating version. Generalizations do not seem to be the same words one would associate a journalist with. TV was free, but now people pay for in time and money. They are constantly looking for profit centers. Antitrust rulings keep companies from owning too much, and the companies are no longer stopped from syndicating by fin-syn. Buying smaller channels is a way for bigger companies to make money, too. CBS and NBC were the first two major companies for broadcasting. The FCC limits the sizes of conglomerates, questioned by the NRA. Critics argue that owning so much of each media type (radio, tv, newspaper) decreases competition of

Approximately 57% of Americans get their daily news by watching some kind of nightly news on their televisions, while the internet is not far behind at at 38% (Mitchell 2016). Being a nation of conglomerate monopolies the United States has three major news stations that control a majority of the viewership, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox Television. “The big three”, as they’re know, compete every day for the highest ratings by desperately pulling and keeping in as many viewers as possible, while providing vastly different agenda backed content. Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, draws in a much smaller crowd and with it has a significantly lower budget for stories. While companies like CNN and FOX are able to spend tens of millions of dollars on 24/7

“The whole problem with news on television comes down to this all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on one page of a newspaper”. The average news cast is only twenty-two minutes long,and that's not nearly enough time to cover the days events.In Neil Postman’s essay “The News” Postman talks about the structure,content,and goals and results of a television news cast. The news can be compared to the theatres in terms of its structure. According to Postman, “Music takes us immediately into the realm of the symbolic, a world that is not to be taken literally.”

In this new day and age we are granted with advanced technology that helps every one of us. A major capability that we now have is the capacity to spread information like no other. The television and internet are major sources to access material and influence the masses. The question becomes whether these sources really inform the people, or just put information out that benefits the few. Evening news is where the breaking stories take place and where we can see the difference in channel ideology. Citizens have a right to know what is going on in the country but due to biases we see this fail. This causes televison to poison the electoral system, glorify conflicts, and polarize views.

It is important to note the following when evaluating China’s media industry: Public service television is an essential service to the community and cohesion of democratic societies aimed at the production, publication and distribution of a set of radio and television channels airing the diverse and balanced for all audiences, covering all genres and designed to meet information needs, culture, education and entertainment of Chinese society, spread their identify and cultural diversity, promote the information society, promoting pluralism, participation and other constitutional values, ensuring access for significant social and political groups.

During any breaking news segment on any 24 hour news coverage channel there seems to always be problems and mistakes that are made by reporters for not having the correct information on the story. Also when there is no significant stories to report on there seems to be a cycle of information that each news channel tries to throw at you. Examples of this would be presidential stories, repeating stories over and over, and so on. Just imagine if one had to have something to say constantly about anything and everything they could find. Would that not get annoying listening to one person speak all day every day about anything they could find. So why do we have these problems and is it even good for the people of the United States to have twenty-four hour news channels?

When it comes to finding about the news of what’s going on in our world, we want details and facts. We want the juice of what’s actually going on. The debate between the efficiency of newspapers and TV news, TV news is a lot more effective.

Both traditional and new media provide information, news and messages to inform us happenings around the world (UK Essays, 2013). Regardless of if it is the newspaper, magazine or Facebook, e-magazine, all types of media are able to relay information and entertainment.

The belief that journalism is in decline has triggered major alarms, because society needs an informational environment that is easily available to all citizens such as newspapers. There is a large body of journalist that suggests that if television has taken over from the press as our main source of news this may limit our capacity to learn about public affairs; newspapers are believed to be far more effective than television at conveying detailed information necessary to understand complex and detailed issues. There is also widespread concern that if journalism fails as a profession it will not be able to reach large sections of the community, particularly younger or less educated readers. This may reinforce a growing gap among citizens between the information that they receive.

More so, It is believed that the success story of Channels Television is solely vested on some factors such as, good programmes that attract the interest of audience likewise advertisers, professionalism, relevance, authenticity, innovation, originality and most importantly integrity (Momoh, 2015 cited by (Filani 2015).

The preparations for 2014 Indian General Elections are in full swing as we are just a couple of months away from it. The three parties challenging for seats in the Legislative Assembly are the Bhartiya Janta Party (Indian People’s Party), the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (New uprising party called the Common Man’s party, a party that is anti-corrupt). Each of these parties are trying to change the perspective of people towards them, this basically includes persuasion tactics, rallies, promises all of which in our country as I would call it is ‘fake’. The entire country knows and believes that as soon as the word of politics is taken, corruption would be the first word following it. Many TV channels, new agencies and other forms of mass media have their learning’s backed by these political parties. It is not about a political bias, it is merely biased towards the party which supports it financially. These political parties financially support the organisation and that particular organisation has a biased opinion towards that party. This is where our entire country is in absolute disarray. The population of the entire country is influenced by what media broadcasts and how they broadcast it, when the media may or may not be portraying the true story to the public. In my honest opinion a series of news articles that accuses the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) for corruption is where I found a biased in our media.