ABSTRACT
The transformations that have taken place in the delivery of journalism since the turn of the millennium have their roots in activities and processes that were begun before the end of the twentieth century, such as the roll-out of 24-hour news or the consolidation of media delivery via multinational monopolies. Cable News Network (CNN), as it is better known, grew out of Turner’s independent station in Georgia, WTBS, and displayed a grandiloquent sense of its own self-importance from the start but, as Kung-Shankleman has observed, there was something quite visionary in CNN’s original mission to reinvent the news. In the “new media” era that began in the late 1970s, television audiences began to fragment and, among other factors, those audiences began to rely more and more on channels that conformed to pre-existing political leanings. The introduction of cable and satellite news, then, represented an important shift in media ecologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
