CNN and Fox figured out how to pose a soap opera as “news”. Stories run for months or years without any real plot movement. Shit happens, but shit has no consequences. The characters just keep on doing more shit.
CBS introduced the genre in 1949. Only a few episodes of Wendy Warren and the News have been preserved. The show is found in OTR collections of news broadcasts because of the name, but in fact it was a soap opera with a clever device attached.
Each episode begins with the actual Douglas Edwards reading the actual CBS headlines for today. Douglas then hands off to Wendy, who reads the actual CBS Women’s News for today. We then hear Wendy leaving the studio, and for the rest of the 15 minutes she is a character in a typical Career Girl soap opera.
Multiple levels of narration were common in radio, after a long history of play-inside-play on stage and movies. Jack Benny’s show was about Jack and Mary’s offstage life, occasionally featuring bits from the “radio show” that Jack and Mary ran when they were “onstage”, which was NOT the same as the show we were hearing. George and Gracie had the same format, but didn’t confuse us by hearing the “show”. Johnny Dollar was a detective who also ran a “radio show” based on his cases, and often dealt with cases generated by his “radio show”, which was NOT the same show we were hearing, even though the actual producers and actors listed in the credits of the show we were hearing were involved in the “cases” arising from the “show” we didn’t hear.
So CNN and Fox are following a long tradition and copying one specific invention.
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Speculating… Most soap operas were intentionally timeless, covering universal human problems. Divorce, accidents, murder, amnesia. Oops, amnesia isn’t really a universal human problem. It was only in soap operas.
Timeless programs can be distributed on discs and replayed at any time, even years later. Wendy Warren couldn’t be syndicated because each episode was time-locked with today’s news. Thus it wasn’t preserved nearly as well as transcribed and timeless shows.
Was CNN thinking about this when it adapted soap operas to “news”? Unlike regular entertainment, each day’s broadcast had to be carried live by all affiliates. They couldn’t insert their own programs with possibly divergent viewpoints. They couldn’t replay today’s program months later when today’s “facts” had already been replaced by the opposite “facts”.
Forced centralization and forced amnesia.
Polistra's Mill 