Gotta Love Deborah Norville.

Back when Ted Turner started the 24 hours cable news industry they said it would never succeed because there isn't enough news to fill 24 hours. They were half-right. Cable news is successful but there isn't enough news to fill 24 hours of programming. So instead we have national news shows increasingly covering local news events like crime and missing persons or fluff.

Deborah Norville sums up the problem with 24 hour news coverage bluntly in an interview with Melanie McFarland from the New York Times News Service.* Talking about her experience at MSNBC she said,

"And increasingly they wanted to do the show live. They wanted it live because Lacey Peterson's mother might cry at the trial. You know, the show they have on now has a lot in common. And I'm sure Rita Cosby is a very hardworking woman, but you will never see Deborah Norville anchoring a show from a whorehouse. I don't think that's the definition of news in this country."

Unfortunately, she's wrong about that.

-tdr

* This post quotes from the interview as it was published today on dead trees in The San Diego Union Tribune's TV Week insert.

Technorati: MSM, Media.