To be fair, CNN’s heyday was mostly centered around the major international crises between the end of the Cold War (“the end of history”) and major uptake of the internet. Similar events would be treated as a “slow news day” today, because the audience only cares about international news when it suits them. Their major domestic coverage of the LA riots would set better precedent for a US audience, except everyone is either inured to the exaggeration of non-news to that proportion or acutely aware that news of that proportion like mass violence is barely reported at all.

I'm skeptical. The "C" in CNN is sort of the giveaway that there was never really any legitimacy there.

Am I picking on cable as a whole, suggesting it was always a profit-driven entity that runs counter to level-headed news reporting? I guess I am.

And I'll defend the "big three" networks that existed before cable because news was only a small portion of their broadcast schedule. I don't think the networks objected to Walter Cronkite (etc.) being the loss-leading face to represent their corporate integrity.

Nah, same amount of news, way less competition for eyeballs back then. CNN had its best commercial times when the Internet was still very small.

For years, if something important happened in the middle of the day, CNN was kind of it, in terms of finding out what was going on quickly. If it was REALLY big, the networks might break into their daytime programming, but that was a very high bar.

Did there used to be? Or did CNN function more like a utility, something between what it is now and the Weather Channel, which is how I remember it? Because it's not that you can't stand up The Weather Channel But For News; it's that you can't compete with Fox and MSNBC doing that.

Even then, not really. Most of the time they had 4-6 hours of actual programming that they just repeated.