Succession Season 4: ATN Explained

Everyone’s rushing around the ATN offices, which we had previously only seen in brief moments, and it looks like your standard 24-hour newsroom. Instead of cubicles, there are clusters of desks, and monitors everywhere show news feeds from around the world. It’s a chaotic thing to experience on a normal day, let alone election night. On the far end of the massive newsroom is the studio itself, so breaking news can be delivered directly to the on-air anchors the moment it drops. 

The need for up-to-the-minute reporting began with the advent of cable news in the early 1990s, though the general public became transfixed by it for the first time during the O.J. Simpson trial beginning in 1994, as curious audiences enjoyed getting immediate information instead of having to wait for Walter Cronkite that evening. (Or, worse yet, waiting for the next day’s newspaper.) Networks like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and others discovered what their newspaper parallels like William Randolph Hearst had learned nearly a century before — sensationalism sells. 

Elections are already fraught with plenty of backhanded tactics, and they’re a fertile playing ground for news networks eager to do the bidding of whichever politicians they’re aligned with. That means manipulating the public by claiming election tampering, spreading rumors about the other candidates, and more. It’s nothing new in politics, but this kind of propaganda has incredible reach when there’s almost always a TV around and there’s a screen in every pocket.