I posted a thread imagining what if Philo Farnsworth and David Sarnoff collaborated to build a national TV network by the 1930s.
Most people imagined this early TV news being turned into "Howard Beale" style punditry by the 1960s.
But this got me thinking about something else.
CNN was originally intended to become an American BBC, but then it was commercialized like everything else.
I watched a CNN special on the 1970s, and it discussed how HBO, because it is a subscription service, was able to get away with things unmentionable on other networks.
What if CNN had been a subscription service? Could it have become a more newsworthy channel?