The appetite for news has actually grown, not diminished. But there are now hundreds of specialized TV sources. Like business news, sports, weather, home and garden channels.

We are watching the same kind of audience shift that killed national, general-interest magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers while the number of specialty magazines grew.

This is also a factor in diminishing daily newspaper circulation. Some people buy a newspaper only to read about sports. So why not get much more of that news from a source that only covers your narrow interest. For the same reason, local TV news sportscasters and meteorologists may also be endangered species.

The chapter continues with the history of local stations affiliating with networks; the current relationship between the networks and their affiliates; how they split the money and the programming; the current percentage of U.S. households with access to cable and how many of them subscribe; how the networks lost their monopoly on national and international news, and what that means for their future; the current deregulation of broadcasting that is leading to large corporations owning large numbers of radio and TV stations; (this was once severely limited by federal regulations to encourage a wider variety of opinions and perspectives on the news); the cross-plugging of cable, broadcast and internet news when they (without the consumer's knowledge) are all owned by the same company; and creeping anecdotal evidence that they are inclined to not report stories that are critical of the parent corporation or its subsidiaries.

By the late 1990s, with the major network audience split and profits down, the networks were gobbled up by corporations with a different kind of heritage. For the most part, the people who run these companies have no journalistic background. Their primary goal in life has always been to make money for the corporation and its stockholders.

They found new ways to make their broadcast and cable properties money machines. What is happening now is a reformation, where the corporations that own the major radio and TV networks will once again reach a very large national audience. But it will be split among the corporation’s many outlets and subsidiaries.

The news segment of their operation is a tiny niche.

Newspapers, aware of their own dire financial positions, are forming alliances with the big communications conglomerates, just to stay in the game. "Convergence" is the term being used when one company provides news in many formats.

Journalists in this culture have always been described as gatekeepers, choosing which stories they will allow the public to read, hear or view. The crucial issue now is how the new media owners will handle news that could help or harm the mother corporation.

The movie The Insider was based on real events. A tobacco insider leaked documents to 60 Minutes that showed tobacco executives had known for years their product was addictive and deadly.

Great news story. All the top tobacco company CEOs had sworn before a Congressional Committee that they did not believe tobacco was addictive. A huge national lawsuit against the tobacco industry was pending.

But because the sale of CBS was being negotiated, corporate lawyers prevented 60 Minutes from broadcasting the story. They felt the story would result in a major lawsuit, and they were afraid Viacom might back out of the deal. So the insider took his information to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal ran with it.

The chapter concludes with other examples of stories that were toned down or killed because they would have embarrassed the corporate owners; other outlets that are reporting on this kind of journalistic conflict of interest, and the status of Congress' mandate that all stations must have high-definition capability by 2006.