About the Guest:
Cory Barker is an assistant teaching professor in the Film Production & Media Studies department and co-host of News Over Noise. His research explores media industry convergence, focusing on legacy media's use of new technologies in production and distribution. His book, Social TV: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture (2022), examines the U.S. television industry's failed social media revolution and won the 2023 Outstanding Book Award from the Media Industries Studies Interest Group. Before joining Penn State, Cory was a tenured faculty member at Bradley University and earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University.
Episode Transcript:
Matt Jordan: Welcome to season three of News Over Noise. Today, we're going to move forward by looking back at history. Change is a constant in media. And we've had some changes on the show as well. Leah Dajches, my cohost for the first two seasons, was a postdoctoral fellow working with the News Literacy Initiative. We always knew she was destined for great things. And she's taken a position at New Mexico State University. In this episode, we'll be introducing our new cohost, Cory Barker, who, along with his interest in media literacy, also happens to be an expert on today's topic. The history of news is also the history of how technology changes the way it's delivered. On November 2, 1920, KDKA, a radio station based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, announced the results of the presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox, kicking off an era of news over radio. Nearly two decades later, on August 24, 1940, the Esso Newsreel aired on NBC on a new technology, television. The program, which featured a mix of news stories, interviews, and commentary, marked the beginning of television as a medium for delivering news to the American public. Then the new millennium came and, with it, a new media, once again changing the way news is delivered. When CBS News 24/7 launched in 2014, it became the first streaming news broadcast in the United States. Today, every major network has a 24/7 free streaming news channel. But the viewership is pretty small. And in this era of news-finds-me mentality, the fact that viewers have to seek out those services via dedicated apps or on YouTube poses a hurdle to adoption of this new format. For the moment, broadcast TV news is doing better than a lot of other TV programs. But how long will that last? What happens to consumer choice and the ability to get diverse media diet without free TV? And how do regulations related to news differ across platforms? To find out, we're going to talk with Cory Barker. Cory is an assistant teaching professor in the Film Production and Media Studies Department at Penn State. His research explores media industry convergence, focusing on legacy media's use of new technologies in production and distribution. His award-winning book, Social TV, Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture, examines the US television industry's failed social media revolution. And again, Cory is going to be my new cohost for this podcast. Cory, welcome to News Over Noise.
Cory Barker: Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Jordan: I'm very excited to be working with you here and especially excited to hear about some of your expertise about how television news has changed over time. So, tell us a little bit about—in broad strokes—about the history of television news broadcasting.
Cory Barker: Yeah, the history of television news broadcasting in many ways is a great way to think about the history of television. So much of early television experiments are news based. A lot of the experiments and projects that are happening in the '40s, in particular, are built around the infrastructure that's already there from radio with our big broadcasters—CBS, ABC, and NBC. But there's also a lot of experimentation that doesn't really work in that period. There is an extension of newsreel programs to focus on the visual side of things that television can bring that radio didn't have. What really takes off in the middle part of the 20th century is when television grows in the home, broadcasters realize that they should have a set schedule built around news. And that's where we see an expansion of the nightly news broadcast from 15 to 30 minutes. That's where we see a more consistent establishment of anchors in the home that people can trust. And that, in many ways, is the peak of national broadcast news, especially in the evening, where we have a lot of the anchors and newscasters that people still might know today in 2025. In the latter part of the 20th century, obviously, the introduction of cable begins to fragment that big national audience with the introduction of things like CNN in the 24/7 news cycle, an increased focus on live footage, live 24/7 global coverage where we're going to correspondents all around the world and really focusing on the spectacle. But that certainly also divides the audience, where the audience has a lot more options for what they can watch. As early as the middle '80s, and as we get further and further into the cable era and into the streaming and internet era, we've seen more and more fragmentation, development of diverse audiences, but also a growing sense that people are watching so many different types of news and getting their news from different places that we don't have that same connection to even an imagined idea of shared reality.
Matt Jordan: So, in that early days of the golden era of television, where we have figures like Ed Murrow, who came over from radio and audiences knew because of his London coverage and whatnot, how did that shape, though, the programming format of the news?
Cory Barker: That's a great question. As I mentioned before, early experiments were more newsreel focused than the extension from 15 to 20—or 15 to 30 minutes, I should say, of coverage at 5:00 or 6:00 PM in prime time really established—we've got one or two anchors who are there to establish trust. You can see them every night. They're talking directly into the camera. And that's where we see an increased focus on national politics, focus on breaking news inasmuch as it can be covered in that era. But the establishment of we have one anchor who's going to be surrounded by a floating cadre of experts who cover certain beats brings together a certain level of consistency and trust, especially as more and more people get televisions in the home in the '60s and '70s.
Matt Jordan: And news was, in a way, a quid pro quo that a lot of these broadcasting companies had. So, they effectively got license over a percentage of the radio spectrum in order to do their broadcasts. And news was a public service that they gave back on. So that changes the way that they cover. When did that start to shift in news, where it was not just the news division was given control over its content, and they tried to do stuff that was serving the public interest? When did the news have to start of pulling in ratings and the very same things that were—the network was pressuring its programmers to do?
Cory Barker: I think, to some extent, that's always there. I mean, the other networks were consistently jealous of Walter Cronkite and trying to figure out, how can we beat CBS? How can we top CBS? Rotating anchors, in particular, to try to find that one person that the audience can trust. But when you've locked somebody in who's America's newsman, it's hard to break through that wall. But I think the next big iteration is something that I mentioned earlier, which is when we have the establishment of CNN and the growth of cable, when there's an obvious growth of who the competitors are and that the audience is being dispersed across different parts of the television dial, if you will, or the program guide, there's an increased focus on, how do we keep people coming to the nightly news when they can get news on CNN 24/7? And especially when there are big world events that are happening, people are thinking about going to CNN a little bit more throughout the day to see what's happening during the first Gulf War. That's the big moment for CNN. And so national broadcasters have to figure out how much they want to break in during the day during these breaking news environments, how they want to treat that coverage, knowing that CNN and other cable news channels are going to be all over it. And they're going to be approaching it from 15 different angles because they've got air to fill. And then if you're ABC or NBC, you're coming on, and you've got 30 minutes. So, you're trying to figure out, how can we cover this journalistically in a way that we stand by but also maybe appeal to folks who are being peeled away by your CNNs and MSNBCs and Foxes of the world.
Matt Jordan: So, in the early days of cable, obviously cable—well, not obviously, but our audience might not know that cable has—abides by different rules. The FCC has a lot less to say about cable than they do—station licensing is less of an issue. And CNN, in the early days, didn't quite understand what it was doing. People thought with now that it's more than a half hour news every night, we're going to be able to cover so much more. And so, they started off covering farm reports and all sorts of different things. And it didn't really work in terms of the economic imperatives to get advertisers to buy ad time and whatnot. I think sometimes cable historians look at the Reagan assassination as the first big moment where you can literally see people figuring out how it's going to work, because in the early days, the press feed didn't go to cable news. And all of a sudden, CNN had the same press coverage of the assassination of Reagan. And you can see them figuring out on air, “We're live here. We're going to go to this.” And after that moment, you really see cable news figuring out that breaking news, that temporal dynamic, as opposed to curating the news every night into a package that Americans get what they need to know in a half an hour. You see this expansion to fill the time, really. But it's not really having to abide by the same rules. So, in those early days, you see this same legacy media quid pro quo. But over time, that starts to shift, right?
Cory Barker: Yeah. And I think your point about the attempted Reagan assassination is a great one. And we see, especially in big breaking events, the advantages that cable, especially a CNN, has, when if they have the infrastructure to be able to cover these things immediately but then also to bring in experts from 15 different areas, whether those are specifically related to the topic in question and just fill time with all of these different angles, especially when there's not a lot of actual new information related to this inciting incident. When they're just vamping for time, when they're waiting for the press conference from law enforcement or they're waiting for additional pieces of information to come from a hospital or people on the ground during a natural disaster, that becomes the default way that people start to think about news, especially in the real-time environment where you have—instead of an anchor talking to you confidently in a prepackaged 90 seconds, you have multiple anchors or an anchor and multiple experts or analysts just talking and even speculating, even educational speculation about what's happened and what that means. There's that turn towards not just here's what happened, but here's what happened. And now we need to talk about the implications or the consequences or the context, which can be a productive way to inform the citizens. But when you don't have all the information but you're live on air and you've got to fill time between a few ad breaks, that's when we can get into what we might call less responsible coverage.
Matt Jordan: If you're just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I’m Matt Jordan. I’m talking with Cory Barker, an assistant teaching professor at Penn State, about the implications of streaming the news. Well, even in terms of responsibility, the technology has a lot to do with it so that a television is a visual media. So, what do you start to see on the television news because it's a visual media?
Cory Barker: Yeah. I mean, that's where we start to see way more live shots. We also start to see a lot of B-roll of, when we're talking about disasters, people that are suffering. That's when we're starting to see the increased focus on having a correspondent stand right in the middle of a disaster zone or something horrible that's happened and gesture and, again, speculate about what's going on. But to your other point related to cable, or to add to that, that's where we see the increase of breaking news chyrons, the additional information visually on the screen, where the presence of the anchor or the people, the human beings on screen, starts to get minimized or squished because now we have three different layers of a bottom line ticker and then a breaking news ticker. And now we're also providing the chyron for who this person is. Maybe we're adding things on either side of the image. We're seeing multiscreen simulcasts or multi-frame simulcasts, where maybe the CNN anchor is setting up, now that we're going to go live to the sheriff. Or we're going to give you the live feed from the local affiliate somewhere. But I'm going to talk over it as the CNN anchor. So, we're seeing multiple streams of information, visual and textual, coming at us all at once.
Matt Jordan: So, over time, as cable news started to grab bigger market share, you start to see a shift in the way that cable news works as well. And you talked a little bit about fragmentation. So, describe how the introduction of Fox News, say, for example, starts to change the way that news is covered.
Cory Barker: Yeah, I mean, obviously Fox News is now infamous for the shifts that they've brought forth in the cable and the general news environment, where we're moving to a place where the news is covered far more through an ideological filter, a visible, pronounced ideological filter. Clearly, all news, starting from broadcast all the way through the cable era, has a certain bent to it. They're making editorial choices. But when we see the introduction of Fox News, and especially the growth of Fox News inspired by a lot of the things that are happening in conservative talk radio at the time, that's when you're seeing so much more focus on how this event impacts or reflects a particular political party or reflects what Fox News talent or producers might want to perpetuate from an ideological standpoint.And that creates an environment where people can now go and, of course, find news that may fit exactly what they believe or maybe aligns with a couple of things that they believe. And then they can fall a little bit further into that ideology if they stick with that news source. And that then leads to the creation of other news programs and cable channels that have a little bit more of an ideological bent.
And you see the financial incentives. When MSNBC starts, it's not necessarily started as a way to be the liberal corrective to Fox News.
Matt Jordan: It was actually a conservative station.
Cory Barker: Absolutely, yeah. And so, then they realized that there are financial reasons, beyond politics, beyond ideology, to provide something else to a cable consumer that is maybe looking for something that is not CNN, which is perceived to be down-the-middle live coverage and not the perceived to be ideological bent of Fox News. They start providing coverage filtered through a perceived liberal or Democrat ideology and vision.
Matt Jordan: Well, there's a political bias, but there's also a production bias as well. One of the things that they borrowed from talk radio was the move away from the staid presentation style of the Harry Reasoners and David Brinkleys and Walter Cronkites toward something more fun, toward somebody who would express emotion, be bombastic, use their voice to do storytelling, all the stuff that was kind of forbidden in the early professional annals of journalism. With cable news emulating that shock jock format, you start to see a shift toward a more emotional kind of delivery as well.
Cory Barker: Yeah. And what we think of as credibility and trust with someone like Cronkite, where he's the centerpiece of the CBS Nightly News, but it's not called, like, Cronkite. It's called the CBS Nightly News or Evening News. And he is the anchor most of the time and then is replaced by Dan Rather and so on. We start to see, in the cable environment, it's not just the force of personality from a credibility standpoint. It's as you said, the performance of it, the charisma of it, the ability or the willingness to go loud, to go controversial, to have more of a debate, but also then to start to build shows around those people, their personalities, their brands, where we have things called The O'Reilly Factor. We have Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of these folks, where it is a new show in theory. But what you're seeing, even on the programming guide, is that this is O'Reilly Factor. You're coming here for Bill's reaction to the news, not for the news. You're there to see and to listen to his version of the day's events and sometimes not even that day's events. It becomes more like an ongoing serialized narrative, where individual anchors or talent have their 3 to 10 things that they're always frustrated by or really angry by or really happy about. And they're able to tie those things back to maybe something that's happening that day or that week. But it's not even a necessity that those folks on cable talk about things that happened in the last 24 hours, since their last episode. They're there to talk about things that they think are important. And their audience tends to go with them.
Matt Jordan: Yeah. And so over time, I think, one of the things you see as well is, whereas the early days of CNN, where they're showing the farm reports and showing international affairs and whatnot, I think, over time, what you start to get is a smaller amount of content every day, just repeated again and again and again in the mouths of these different personalities. So, it'll be the same story that you get repeatedly through the day but told from the different anchor. The one who you prefer is going to give you your commentary.
Cory Barker: Yeah. And then you also start to see the reuse of that coverage on each of those shows. So, on O'Reilly, you might see multiple segments replayed from Fox and Friends where he's playing that from earlier in the morning to show you one newsy item. Or they had a conversation with a politician, or they had a reporter live on Congressional Hill or whatever. But what that's also doing is just reusing programming and content that they've created at different parts of the day, which allows it to be a more cost-effective way to produce news. And you can generate stories out of what your personalities have said in reacting to news. We're talking mostly about political top-level news here. But certainly, something like sports news and ESPN, they've become great at this too. Somebody says something on a podcast, gets covered on First Take, gets covered on ESPN Radio, then makes its way to SportsCenter.
And it's this whole churning of the cycle on one tidbit of news or even one reaction to the news becomes a day's worth of content, which is both cost effective and a way to get your talent out there across all of these different platforms.
Matt Jordan: Right, right. So, one of the things that MSNBC, which is Microsoft—so that's—we're starting to talk about—in the era of the 2000s, we're starting to talk about the emergence of digital. What does digital do to the way news content is distributed, even when we're still talking about the content producers largely being cable news providers?
Cory Barker: Yeah. I mean, obviously, the introduction of digital news reporting plays a big role in upending the industry, which would take up multiple episodes, of course. But I think the relationship between digital news and television news is really interesting because we start to see the growth of digital reporting serving as the source for content and programming on TV, where a digital site, whether it's a company that's owned by one of these broadcasters or cable channels or not, they report something at random parts of the day. And that then gives especially the folks on cable news more material to work with throughout the day. If there's a new story that breaks in The Atlantic at 11:00 AM, now folks who are maybe working on programming on MSNBC or Fox or CNN have the ability to react to that story. And especially as cable becomes more reactive to news, as opposed to exclusively reporting it, the stuff that's being reported and produced across the digital realm now becomes source material. And as the news cycle speeds up because of the growth of digital news and the internet, that speeds up the cycle on cable news and eventually on broadcast, where I think all of these different media play into one another in a way that just pushes the speed of the news cycle further and faster.
Matt Jordan: Yeah. So, now that we're talking about streaming, so how is that starting to shift the way that content is produced and distributed?
Cory Barker: So, all of the big broadcast networks, if we stick with ABC, NBC, and CBS, they have infrastructures now that are far more integrated. And they are producing news packages and stories with all of these different platforms in mind. And each of these broadcasters has their own 24/7 streaming news channel app, depending on where you're accessing them, whether that's in your YouTube TV Guide or just on YouTube proper or through links on social media. They all have an operation that is thought to be streaming only. So different talent. But a lot of the stories that are reported on the website for NBC News are then serving as source material for NBC News Now, the live streaming focus for NBC. And then some of those stories naturally are going to make their way to the NBC Nightly News, maybe presented by the same person who presented them on the streaming app but also maybe not. If they've got a more higher-level on-air talent that they want to present that story, there's going to be some collaboration there where a more familiar face in prime time on broadcast TV is presenting that story. But you're seeing an attempt to try to cover all bases.
Matt Jordan: And so, what does this do to—we talked a lot about, in the early days of television, this synchronicity, that everybody's—every night the news hour is the news hour on all the channels. And so, every night, people are tuning in for a shared environment, tuning in for a shared reality. And as you described it, this is the story of the history of the fragmentation as well. So how is the move to streaming as a mode of content distribution changing that temporality, that experience of sharing the same news every day?
Cory Barker: I think it's having a huge impact. It's impossible to know for sure who's watching what at any given time. But when we have the same news source and NBC and ABC and CNN putting news on a dozen different platforms at different parts of the day, something they've been doing for years—but it has increased significantly over the last decade—it's hard to say that that doesn't have an effect, that if you're consuming news primarily through NBC on YouTube and you're getting it mostly on demand, you're clicking on the stories that matter to you versus someone who's just sitting down and watching it in the evening, where they've more clearly curated the five things that they think are most important in the A block, that's a different experience of the news. And that's a different experience of your understanding of a shared reality and how you come to understand what's important to you and what's important to the people around you. And then when you take that to something like social media, where even those segments that appear on the live streaming app on YouTube or on their streaming channels, and those are chopped down even more. They're edited to be more vertical video. They've had text put on them. The context changes. And that changes the understanding of what you're seeing but also the relationship to other people that might be consuming it. Now, of course, things like Instagram or TikTok or even Twitter and Facebook give you the ability to see what other people are saying. You get that reactive element that's more visible than what you get on broadcast TV. But that's certainly a completely different form of participation and connectivity in a social media environment versus the imagined, shared reality that I think we have when you watch something live on a mass, mass medium like television.
Matt Jordan: What kind of laws govern streaming? So, the cable was—back up there. With the FCC, used to cover the airwaves. And they would give licensing to stations. And that was the discipline that they could pressure people. Is there any governing body that is going to look at how streaming works in the same way?
Cory Barker: Not really, at least not right now. When we're talking about broadcasters or channels that exist on more conventional media and then have moved to the streaming environment, they do have less regulation about what they cover, how they cover it, the ads that go on their programming. And that's where there has been, again, as I mentioned, some at least congressional memos sent around that we need to do, as a government, the US government thinking, should we at least bring streaming into the realm of cable to maybe not legislate it or treat it in the same way that we would treat ABC proper and local affiliates related to that? But there's not been a lot of energy here in the United States for that sort of thing. I think that's something that people will continue to talk about. Whether or not anything happens as a result, of course, is the big question.
Matt Jordan: What does that offer as a potential? For example, one of the things we're seeing early in the new administration is an attack on public broadcasting, that has Brendan Carr, the FCC head, who promised in Project 2025 that he would go after PBS because they couldn't be disciplined by the market. And so, he's now going after them for having commercials. Does the ability for PBS, say, to now put their stuff on a streaming platform and chop their content up and gather the revenue that they could gather from that, does that provide public broadcasting, a means of an opportunity?
Cory Barker: Potentially. I mean, I think the challenge with that is the scale of it, which is the same issue that basically every media company and individual content creator is dealing with, where if you go that route and you're thinking about different forms of subscription or support, which is very embedded into the public broadcasting model, getting support from viewers, in theory, that sounds like a great idea. I think the challenge is the market being so competitive, you know we’ve seen more corporate driven media companies trot out streaming apps or subscription models for their programming or content that have failed gloriously, like CNN+ being a big one that rolled out in 2022 and lasted about a month, that they thought, OK, people love CNN. So, they're going to subscribe to it. Fox has done the same thing with Fox Nation, had a little bit more success. But almost all of the programming is documentary. It's not a lot of even the types of news programming that they do on Fox News, the cable channel. So, there is a route for public broadcasting to explore more piecemeal, subscription-based content to a really dedicated, passionate person who loves public broadcasting and PBS. The question is whether or not there are enough of those people to maintain any semblance of the budget and production value of the things that PBS has been able to do. You know, the slight positive thing right now is that they're not beholden to the same ratings and financial and corporate expectations that all of these other companies are. As soon as you move to a streaming environment and it's, “We need to get a certain number of subscribers or supporters every month and avoid churn,” that's a really uphill battle to try to face in a ecosystem that is so competitive.
Matt Jordan: Cory, thank you so much for being with us. And we'll hear from you more.
Cory Barker: Thank you so much. Looking forward to it.
Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Cory Barker, an assistant teaching professor at Penn State and the incoming cohost of this podcast. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan. Until next time, stay well and well informed.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
