I was reading Roger Ebert’s excellent piece about the sad template that Bill O’Reilly is currently etching, and it occurred to me that the problem on the 24-hour news network isn’t the creeping partisan politics masquerading as news, it’s the networks themselves.

Consider: prior to the 1980s, the national news was a half-hour long and took place once a day. Paltry? Probably. But also well researched, fact-checked, and thought-out.

Before the advent of continued news coverage, the people charged with reporting the evening news took the time to consider what was important, how to frame it so that the relevant parts were underlined, and, finally, how to present it so that everyone in America could understand it. This wasn’t because they were geniuses, it was a function of having 23 and 1/2 hours a day to work on the problem: there was time to try to get the news right.

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