24-hour news cycle

This article is about the fast-paced cycle of news media in technologically advanced societies. For the longer-term cycle of news and information, see information cycle.

Several simultaneous NBC News broadcasts (including MSNBC, NBC's Today and CNBC's Squawk Box) displayed on monitors

The 24-hour news cycle (or 24/7 news cycle) is the 24-hour investigation and reporting of news or informational content, typically by for-profit media agencies engaged in mass communications. The proliferation of mass media and the growth of the cable television market in recent decades has increased competition for audience and advertiser attention, prompting agencies to seek to deliver the latest news in the most compelling manner possible in order to remain ahead of competitors. Television, radio, print, online and mobile app news media all have many suppliers that want to be relevant to their audiences, principally by delivering the news first.

Although all-news radio stations had operated for decades prior, the 24-hour news cycle truly arrived with the advent of cable television channels dedicated exclusively to news in the 1980s. This shift brought about a much faster pace of news production, and an increased demand for continuous reporting with real-time updates. This stood in marked contrast to the slower pacing of the news cycle seen previously in printed dailies. The high premium on immediate coverage would further increase with the advent of online news.

A complete news cycle consists of the media reporting on an event, followed by it reporting on public and organizational reactions to previous reports. The advent of 24-hour cable and satellite television news channels and, in more recent times, of news sources on the World Wide Web (including blogs), has considerably shortened the timeframe within which this process occurs.

History

1904 political cartoon by Bob Satterfield satirizing the glut of news of the Russo-Japanese War.

Cultural origins

The 24-hour news cycle ultimately traces its origins to the dramatic technological changes witnessed amid the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century: the development of telegraphic communication systems in 1858—along with improved freight and passenger transport by means of steam and rail travel—allowed rapid communication and travel across long distances and into once deeply isolated communities. These advancements created the earliest shifts in norms surrounding communication, information, and the speed at which the latter was expected and able to be made available to the general viewing public.

Evidently, norm shifts occurred almost instantaneously. Supposedly, the second message ever transmitted by telegraph–immediately following the first sent by Samuel Morse from Washington to Baltimore in 1844–was "have you any news?" In the years that followed, the urgency with which news was received and sought after increased proportionately to improvements in the speed and quality of communications systems.

1985 photograph of Don Miller, one of the original anchors of CNN.

CNN and the advent of cable television

Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld pioneered the concept of 24-hour network news with their founding of Cable News Network (CNN) in 1979. First airing in 1980, the network struggled initially, and was widely viewed within the industry as a hopeless enterprise; by the end of the decade, though, it had stabilized, and eventually became a model for other networks as cable television proliferated, competition for viewership among a larger cohort of networks increased, and shifting strategies to sustain viewership substantively and qualitatively changed the nature of media.

Beginning in 1982, following the example set by CNN, C-SPAN extended its broadcast schedule from 8 to 16, then ultimately 24-hour daily coverage; the network states that this extension "enabl[ed] it to add a wider variety of public affairs programming to [sic.] viewers while maintaining its commitment to carry the proceedings of the U.S. House". CNN's success led to the proliferation of round-the-clock cable news stations in the 1990s, seeking to compete with CNNs model.

In 2015, Time magazine noted that the 1995 O. J. Simpson murder case was a significant early example of the 24-hour news cycle.

The rise of online media

The public launch of the World Wide Web in 1993, and subsequent widespread adoption of various Internet tools and services by the public in the late 1990s catalyzed what was an already near-instantaneous news consumption culture. The subsequent mass interweaving of global communication channels, alongside the proliferation of online forums and open source digital resources virtually erased barriers to entry for citizen journalism, accelerating both the production and consumption of reporting on real-time events worldwide.

Critical assessment

It would be reasonable to assume that the competition spurred by the expansion and diversification of media would result in a greater diversity of viewpoints and strategies employed by networks to attract viewership, thus driving improved journalism and journalistic standards; however, the advent of cable television instead drove the hyper-personalization of news feeds and the outlets that supplied them, as the industry increasingly lost market share to other forms of media, and thus pursued more extreme strategies to attract the attention of audiences and readers.

According to former journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, 24-hour news creates wild competition among media organizations for audience share. This, coupled with the profit demand of their corporate ownership, has led to a decline in journalistic standards. They state in their book Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media that "the press has moved toward sensationalism, entertainment, and opinion" and away from traditional values of verification, proportion, relevance, depth, and quality of interpretation. They feared these values would be replaced by a "journalism of assertion" which de-emphasizes whether a claim is valid in favor of placing it into the arena of public discussion as quickly as possible.

Turner himself acknowledged the inherent biases of network media in a 1984 congressional committee hearing, though framing it through the lens of the "[Big Three] networks remain[ing] insensitive to the public interest and [other] social interests in their uncontrollable desire for ratings and revenue". He ultimately felt it best remedied, though, by increased competition through expansion of the marketplace.

Psychological and societal effects

The psychological effect of constant and overbearing exposure to information on regional or global events is pronounced. A Civil War era account by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., detailing the "war fever" afflicting men of the time, serves as one of the earliest observations on the psychological effects of relatively instantaneous communication. Holmes spoke of a "nervous restlessness" within which "men [could] not think, or [sic.] write, or attend to their ordinary business".

In the modern era, overexposure to media has been shown to exacerbate the negative effects of pre-existing mental health conditions, notwithstanding "significant associations between media consumption and post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic stress, stress reactions, anger, dreams, alcohol drinking, negative emotions, and complicated grief above and beyond other sources", particularly as pertains to coverage of war, disasters, terror attacks, and other tragic / mass casualty events. Psychological effects on the subjects of media exposure are equally pronounced. As early as 1982, with the introduction of round-the-clock coverage on C-SPAN, Washington Post reporter Kathryn Buxton noted that "the influence of the camera's eye" [on members of the House] was evident".

See also

• CNN effect
• Feiler faster thesis
• Information overload
• Information pollution
• Infotainment

Works cited

• Brownell, Katheryn (2023). "Shifting Television News Values in Cable America". Political Rhetoric and the Media: The Year in C-SPAN Research. 8 1. 1-16 – via JSTOR.
• Mass Communication, Media, and Culture - An Introduction to Mass Communication. University of Minnesota Libraries. 2016. ISBN 9781946135261.
• Bowman, Shayne; Willis, Chris (2003). "Thinking Paper: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information" (PDF). WeMedia.

Further reading

• Nik Gowing (2009), Skyful of Lies & Black Swans, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, OL 25009477M