The cable news networks are taking some heat this week following this weekend’s anti-police protests in Baltimore.
Saturday night is the specific problem. While two of the big three all news cable networks carried coverage of the White House correspondents’ dinner, featuring the president, violent protests were taking place less than an hour north in Baltimore. The protests were related to the police custody death of Freddy Gray – the latest in a series of incidents that have led people to question the relationship between police and minority communities nationwide.
The issue has CNN, MSNBC and Fox on the defensive for their coverage decisions and is raising questions about whether the networks are really committed to 24/7 news coverage. As for the second point; the period between Saturday evening and Sunday morning has always been kind of an all news dead zone where it has been hard to justify spending the resources on full staffing levels for those 12 or so hours each week in which almost nothing ever happens.
