You're idealising CNN in the 80s. One important milestone in their early history was broadcasting live the explosion of space shuttle Challenger. During the first gulf war, we got live footage of missiles hitting their targets. That's technologically fantastic, but in terms of journalistic value, it's just one, small step above Kim Kardashian.
CNN is widely credited with inventing and pushing the 24 hour news cycle, driving the subdivision of news into every smaller and ever less important chunks, incessantly valuing speed over depth. "You heard it here first!" - well, who the h... cares?
Anyway, my point, which I don't feel you meaningfully addressed was that once you get out your wallet, every newsstand out there are piled high with magazines and weeklies dedicated to every conceivable topic, many of them high quality (and many of them, admittedly, not!), plenty of them completely devoid of Kardashian-themed content. Just go buy them instead of lamenting that your free entertainment is worth exactly what you paid for it.
I think coverage of the Challenger explosion is way above the Kardashians. And I'm not idealizing it based on recollection. Try actually watching some old broadcasts. It's the difference between the Internet circa 2001 and the Internet circa 2014 (it's a lot easier to hide crap content beneath flash and dynamic JS widgets than it is to do the same in plain text).
My point which you're ignoring is that the existence of competition from the crap forces legitimate media down market. For the cost of a cable subscription, CNN is a lot crappier than it was 20 years ago.
CNN is widely credited with inventing and pushing the 24 hour news cycle, driving the subdivision of news into every smaller and ever less important chunks, incessantly valuing speed over depth. "You heard it here first!" - well, who the h... cares?
Anyway, my point, which I don't feel you meaningfully addressed was that once you get out your wallet, every newsstand out there are piled high with magazines and weeklies dedicated to every conceivable topic, many of them high quality (and many of them, admittedly, not!), plenty of them completely devoid of Kardashian-themed content. Just go buy them instead of lamenting that your free entertainment is worth exactly what you paid for it.