No more. By the early 2020s, the channels no longer covered the same topics, save for rituals like elections and certain emergencies like mass shootings. This was the single greatest change I tracked in twenty-plus years covering cable news. It’s tempting to say this was a positive development—less duplication and more diversity across the dial—or to turn it into a punch line—hey, while Fox was hyperventilating about Dr. Seuss, CNN was interviewing actual doctors about Covid. But it wasn’t funny at all. It was a serious transformation, a symptom of a country coming apart, a country full of
...more
