Television has different problems from newspapers. Newspapers at least have the option of going into detail on one in a hundred stories if they desire to. Television cannot. Even a 24-hour-a-day news station still only has 24-hours, even if they never cover the same story twice. Since they prefer to cover most of the major stories every hour, the true time is vastly less than that. Most television stories are the equivalent of newspaper headlines or ‘pull-out’ text. Television news has the same need to provide sensational information, but less of the resources to ameliorate the sensational information in the ‘fine print’, because there isn’t any fine print.
Television cannot provide a proportional number of pro and con viewpoints for any non-controversial issue, because they don’t have time to provide fifty interviews on one side to correctly balance the one interview on the other side.
