The linear flow of television programming persists despite the rise of on-demand viewing, and we see it in action from morning to night on twenty-four-hour cable news channels. Flow, a theory of television formulated in the 1970s, found renewed significance during the Trump presidency. The combination of a politically charged atmosphere and a national leader who deployed Twitter as a megaphone for insults, praise, and policy renewed the energy of cable news, which in turn created new opportunities for scholars to reimagine the relevance of television flow in the twenty‐first century. Using MSNBC coverage of four events from 2017 and 2018 – the indictment of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, the attempted firing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI raid on Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and the release of former FBI Director James Comey’s memoir – this chapter argues that the flow of cable news programming is tied to memory and magnitude – not the resolution of, but the accumulation of, politically charged information, crises, and catastrophes across the day and all days.
Chapter in A Companion to Television, Wasko, Janet, and Eileen R. Meehan.
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell (2019)