First I’d say that if you’re running a 24 hour news channel, you need to fill the time with something, and people would complain equally if you just rephrased and repeated the facts over and over. Second, perhaps you don’t, and perhaps I don’t either, but a lot of people want to hear opinions on the news. They want context, and how certain groups view the news, and I suspect, more than anything, they also just enjoy hearing opinions. So the news companies are meeting a demand.
Now I’m quite a left-leaning, pro-govt-intervention person, so I would support government regulation of the news to prevent them playing too heavily to this demand.
However I know that a lot of HN users are not like this, and I’m curious to see where they think the solution could lie