Make it 8. CNN USED to be news, all the time. Now it's mostly political pundits, a great many right wing (as Fox has also become) doing endless blah, blah, blah.
They missed a trick by not including Lifetime, which began in half as a channel aimed at doctors, with explicit surgical footage documentaries...programming that persisted on Sunday mornings well into the '80s.
The SyFyllis Channel's corporate siblings, Cloo and Chiller, are better, if not great. And about as prone to serve the whims of Universal/NBC/Comcast's rights-holding, even if it's not even as arguably relevant as Chiller's FEAR FACTOR reruns.
And cable channels aren't "networks," however commonly this doublethink abuse of the term is thrown about. A network literally requires stations all over, not simply one station fed out nationally. HBO, with its multiple feeds (and including Cinemax) and Showtime (likewise the Movie Channel) and Starz/Encore might be considered networks, or the Universal Cable group as a whole (USA, which pioneered, I think, the misuse of "network, and SyFyllis, Cloo, Chiller, Universal HD, Uni Sports, etc.) could be consider nets...but not a single cable channel. Then again, MHz Worldview, with about three dozen affiliates nationally, and World, with about 150, still call themselves "channels" at times...on the third hand, World does that because there are 800 things in broadcasting called World, and people still want to call them PBS World, a confusion they encouraged at the start.
...and MHz Worldview does it in part because the local cluster of stations at their national HQ, in the DC suburbs, calls their local signals collectively MHz Networks...
Orwell never addressed the well-meant sort of obscurantism...
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There should be seven. SyFy has turned into a big disappointment. Professional wrestling among others!
Make it 8. CNN USED to be news, all the time. Now it's mostly political pundits, a great many right wing (as Fox has also become) doing endless blah, blah, blah.
They missed a trick by not including Lifetime, which began in half as a channel aimed at doctors, with explicit surgical footage documentaries...programming that persisted on Sunday mornings well into the '80s.
The SyFyllis Channel's corporate siblings, Cloo and Chiller, are better, if not great. And about as prone to serve the whims of Universal/NBC/Comcast's rights-holding, even if it's not even as arguably relevant as Chiller's FEAR FACTOR reruns.
And cable channels aren't "networks," however commonly this doublethink abuse of the term is thrown about. A network literally requires stations all over, not simply one station fed out nationally. HBO, with its multiple feeds (and including Cinemax) and Showtime (likewise the Movie Channel) and Starz/Encore might be considered networks, or the Universal Cable group as a whole (USA, which pioneered, I think, the misuse of "network, and SyFyllis, Cloo, Chiller, Universal HD, Uni Sports, etc.) could be consider nets...but not a single cable channel. Then again, MHz Worldview, with about three dozen affiliates nationally, and World, with about 150, still call themselves "channels" at times...on the third hand, World does that because there are 800 things in broadcasting called World, and people still want to call them PBS World, a confusion they encouraged at the start.
...and MHz Worldview does it in part because the local cluster of stations at their national HQ, in the DC suburbs, calls their local signals collectively MHz Networks...
Orwell never addressed the well-meant sort of obscurantism...
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