I agree, a 30 min commercial-laden newscast boils down to very little news. But because they have so little time, they do actually tend to pass on Britney's latest escapade, more so than the cable outfits. They may even get around to talking about the daily carnage in Iraq once in a while (but rarely the complexities and historical issues involved).


>>Walter, that was a riveting story you have to admit. ;)
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>>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.
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>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.
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>>Whats new is the advent of the terribly admin-friendly Faux channel.
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>Not quite new, but you couldn't know how Miloshevich's RTS worked :).