So they aren't always selling soap, but the reason TV exists is to sell you things. You can see this most evidently when it comes to the Super Bowl, everyone tries to make their best commercials for the Super Bowl because they know a lot of people are going to be watching. They could just make their money with tickets, and merchandise, etc, but they try to pump as much money as they can out of it by putting on as many commercials as they can, and charging as much as they can for those commercials. Then they measure everything by ratings, they don't measure a TV show by how effective it is at activating viewers to take actions or some other measure of actual effect, they measure it by how many people, or even dogs left at home with the TV on, were watching. They don't care how many people actually take action based on what they watch (they do think they care, they just don't know how to actually care about this) they are concerned with how many people were possibly watching.
Then on top of that they do things like interview Corporate leaders, etc, they see these people as the most important because they are trapped in a world of commercial sales. They don't understand, for example, why people started sharing things about Ken Bone, because he didn't have 1 Million Twitter Followers or own Starbucks, so why would anybody make memes about him?
A lot of people on the News even think that they are celebrities. They will say things like "I have been covering events like this for 20 years" and not realize that people aren't watching them because of them, they are watching them because of the events they cover. People watch the news to get news and in their minds they think "The camera is pointing at ME!".
If they were actually worried about people, they would be interviewing regular people every day and more people who pop up like Ken Bone, not recycling the same people over and over and over. They are just trying to sell you soap, they don't care if you get the best and deepest information. It is literally impossible for someone to come on TV every day and have a more informed opinion than everyone else, because with every topic, someone out there has spent much more time paying attention to whatever they are talking about than they have. It's just impossible for someone to regularly have more informed opinions about everything than everyone else. Especially when it's not just one person being recycled, but all the same people being recycled. It's like if a reality TV show had the same contestants every season, the News is becoming Jersey Shore.
If nobody was consuming the recycled garbage, the media would stop producing it. But so many are either addicted or just can't figure out anything better to do that they just keep feeding off it. Will the cycle stop?