>>Walter, that was a riveting story you have to admit. ;)
>>
>>Are there any nationally produced 24-hour cable news channels in the Netherlands? Part of the problem is they have to fill so many hours. I dont believe the 1/2 hour CBS, NBC, ABC nightly news shows give the same attention to the infotainment stuff.
>
>Actually I was sufficiently pis*ed off to write a little form with three buttons and three textboxes, each of them showing accumulated time since its associate commanbutton was clicked. First one was for content time, second one for self-advertising (i.e. "coming up next", "you're listening to", "our website" and such) and the third one was for paid ads. I've measured the 23:00 news on CBS and NBC a few times, and it's about 55% content, 12% self-advertising, and the rest is paid. And I actually stopped measuring right after weather - sport is of absolutely no interest to me. In my view, the 30 minutes of "news" boils down to about 10 minutes, out of which any local grease fire or gas station robbery gets about three times more time than events in the whole rest of the world.

We notice over here that when US 1-hour shows are put on the TV they only last c. 45-50 minutes, allowing for the extra commercial breaks. It's easy to see where a break comes in (when the scene fades out then comes back exactly as it was). And THAT's on the UK commercial channels. On the BBC (even allowing for THEIR self-promotion - which only happens between programmes) US 1-hr slots consume only about 40 mins.