Cable news is dying, and if you want proof of it, just ask a guy in charge of selling it.

DISH subscribers went an entire election night without CNN on Tuesday. DISH is negotiating with Turner to get CNN back, but if you take Chairman Charlie Ergan at his word, he's ready to drop the station entirely. And he might even be in the business of burning the whole thing down on his way out.

"You can imagine: CNN down on election night would have been a disaster 15 or 20 years ago. Now there are plenty of other places for people to get news. In fact a lot of people get news not from TV but from their devices," Ergan said on a conference call on Wednesday.

"Things like CNN are not quite the product that they used to be. "

Then he went all the way in.

"Twenty years ago, CNN was a must-have channel, but it's not a top 10 network anymore," he said. "Unless they find the plane—the Malaysian plane."

Of course, this rare bit of emotional honesty is just a negotiating tactic for DISH, which has been forced to black out Turner networks—from CNN to TNT to TBS—since October 21st. They're hoping for a better carriage deal, and this is haggling.

But what if Ergan is right? What if CNN has lowest common denominator'd itself into obsolescence? What if there are numbers that prove it?

"We know how many minutes people watch CNN and how many minutes they watched five years ago and it's hard to pay a double-digit price increase for something that people are watching half as much as they used to watch," he said. "It's Turner's job to make their product better. Not ours."

Last night, six different Big Bang Theory re-runs beat CNN's best hour of election coverage in the key 18-49 ratings demo. Twenty-five cable shows finished above CNN's best hour in the network's most important demographic.

Unless a consumer prefers one piece of information repeatedly barfed into his or her face, followed by a tepid, between-the-lines discussion about decorum and personality politics, cable news has rendered itself useless to anyone genuinely interested in news unbeholden to corporate interest or the ratings intrigue of perpetual two-party gridlock.

CNN last night rolled out its Guess Who board of on-the-scene reporters and rarely cut to them, arguing instead about the optics of a Democratic loss in both houses of Congress and the politics of celebrity. Last night was about the rising stars of the GOP, the falling stars of the left, the Tea Partiers who "put shoes on" for this election, and the new farm teams in America's governors seats.

It was the language of sports, or it was the language of Dancing With The Stars, because everything in America must be entertainment to hide that the top, increasingly, has everything else.

Shortly after the Senate was called for the right, Wolf Blitzer stumbled upon some actual news: Ted Cruz was on his show, and he was refusing to endorse Mitch McConnell for his presumed new role of Senate Majority Leader.

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This was a potential 2016 presidential frontrunner waffling about a direct question—and one he knew would be asked. Blitzer asked once more then immediately moved on.

It was back to the Democrats at the designated pundit table getting their turn, followed by the rote Republican response. Nothing in between.

And there's the problem: All of the drilled-deep journalism school rules are there. Ask a follow-up! Allow for the other side!

What if that's not enough? What if the by-the-book rules of journalism no longer apply when the game has been rigged against it? No one has asked this: What if you need to keep asking the follow-up until he answers? What if there are more than two sides, and presenting only two sides is what created and perpetuated the false choice that's ruining the country?

Well, some people have questioned if it's enough. Some of them are at FiveThirtyEight. Some of them are, thankfully, on this website. Some of them are the features that wound up on Reddit and Digg and the less terrible parts of Twitter the morning after.

The most analytical voices in the news are not on cable. Not anymore, if they ever were. Just ask the guy who needs you to buy it.

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