People, Personas, and Politics 31 – Happy-Happy, Joy Joy
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/19
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Rick Rosner: In the 60s, they were probably at least in the top 3 sources of people’s news. Most people were still reading newspapers, but most people were also watching the half-our nightly news broadcasts. Those things didn’t have to make money. They were a public service. Everything else was designed to make money. Anyway, then things changed, people noticed that if you put on morning news and you made it a 3-hour happy news kind of sunny people in the morning Today Show with the late 50s and David Garroway, he had a co-anchor who was a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs.
[Laughing] Any time you’ve got a co-anchor who is a monkey then you’re doing news wrong. People noticed these 2 and 3 hour news broadcasts were making a butt load of money. Then the whole Iranian hostage crisis, which begins under Carter in 1978 or 1979, and ABC starts running Nightline. It began as a half-hour update on the hostage situation 5 nights a week. It ran after the local news.
Then you had CNN come online in the 80s. As the—so in the beginning in the late 70s and 80s, people begin realizing that you can make news jazzy, and you can expand it. You can make a lot of money off of local news. You can make money off certain national news shows. Eventually, CNN started making money, then around 1986 you have Fox News come one. Roger Ailes noticed that – the evil blowfish Roger Ailes – you can use a news channel as propaganda.
So for 20 years and more, T.V. news was not profit driven. Now, it is crazily profit driven. [End of recorded material]
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