What we've learned from 20 weeks of "Getting the News": it's really fucking hard
blog.news.me
blog.news.me
A network news program isn't a terrible way to keep up with what's going on in the world. When the revolution happened in Egypt, the network coverage used the best HD television techniques to put you in the action -- the events and the places where the story, not the studio and the branding.
If you look at Fox or CNN, on the other hand, 35% of time*space is devoted to branding for the channel. Fox shows a crawler that says "ALERT" whenever the camera leaves the studio because this is a dangerous intrusion of the real into their matrix.
There's enough going on in the world to fill a quality one hour news program, but not enough for 24 hour news -- so they cover a lot of non-news and the production values are awful. It used to be they'd bring in an expert in a suit to get interviewed on camera, now they call some guy on the phone who's curled up in bed wearing bunny slippers.
There's also a fetish with being live that results in boring footage of white people talking. When North Korea's dictator died, CNN showed some white guy talking about it in the dark. Al Jazeera showed South Koreans launching balloons with propaganda telling people in the North to revolt... What's better television?
Al Jazeera largely ditches the studio and revolves around (mainly) short segments of documentary programming produced by local teams throughout the world -- a team like this with a few people and prosumer equipment can turn out at least one segment every 24 hours. They'll play segments more than once and mix in an occasional one hour documentary produced by a better equipped team.
It's much better TV, and one of the reasons they keep it off cable in the U.S. is that it would make Fox and CNN look terrible in comparison and force them to raise their game.