Marshall here. Welcome back to The Realignment.

Today's guest is Catherine Carabronau, author of the recently released 24-7 politics,

cable news, and the fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News.

One of the realignment themes when it comes to the future of media is that we're clearly

at a transition point. On the one hand, the cable news business model is collapsing due to

finding cable subscriptions, so we could be at the very beginning of the last cable news election.

At the same time, what comes next isn't at all clear. As we think about the various

possibilities, Catherine's work, and the conversation itself, takes us back to the dawn of the

cable news era in the 1970s, and the underlying truth that our news ecosystem isn't just the

result of markets and consumer demand, but instead is the product of active regulatory choices

by federal and state governments. We could have approached the cable news ecosystem in a completely

different way when it came to the initial technological innovations of the 1970s. Catherine asks

if we could do something similar today. Huge thank you to the foundation for American

innovation, for supporting the work of this podcast, and a reminder that we have our upcoming

Q&A AMA discussion episode for supercast subscribers, so if you'd like to get access to that

for episode, go to realignment.supercast.com, or click the link at the top of the show notes.

Catherine Cramer Brownow, welcome to the realignment. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I'm really psyched to talk with you. It's interesting. I am someone who used to work at PBS.

I then got into podcasting, doing this independently, but as we were discussing for the episode,

I'm working at UT starting this week, and I'm also like a think tank fellow, so I'm both

the very centralized end of media and also the decentralized side of this. There's a million

things I want to ask, but let me just ask you this first question. This book and so much of our

...