There’s a familiar headline on my TV screen: “Dad Arrest: Drunk Driving, Baby Not Strapped In!”

Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a non-baby story on Nancy Grace’s CNN Headline News program. So no surprise there. What’s baffling is how much time she manages to eat up blathering about troubled teens, irresponsible parents and dangerous toys.

I’ve been timing it: Six minutes, 20 seconds and running. Were it not for the mute button, I would have changed the channel six minutes, 15 seconds ago. Cut to commercial…phew.

Bear in mind, Nancy Grace fills CNN Headline News’s prime-time slot. That’s right: the channel devoted solely to “headline news” sees fit to shower its largest day-part audience with this lawyer’s drawn-out, self-righteous pontifications on the day’s most insignificant goings-on.

Of course, it’s not just CNN Headline News. If you’ve perused the cable news prime-time circuit lately, you may have noticed an across-the-dial lineup of personality- and opinion-driven “news” shows. They all have them, and they all look and sound awfully similar. CNN, MSNBC and Fox have veritably morphed into one. In fact, were it not for their glaring, animated logos—and in Fox’s case, an American flag—so prominently fixed in the corner of the screen, it might be pretty difficult to tell which station you’re tuned into.

Analyst Andrew Tyndall suggests the journalism on cable news channels serves three distinct sets of needs: news on demand; crisis coverage; and prime-time personality, news and opinion programming. These days, it isn’t too hard to tell which of those baskets is catching all the eggs.

First, a brief cable-news timeline. CNN pioneered the format in 1980, its 24-hour-news format filling a gap for many Americans between the morning paper and the evening news. CNN Headline News followed in 1982 as an abridged version of its parent, delivering all the day’s pertinent news in 30-minute chunks for the on-the-go (read: short-attention-span) news consumer. Fox News Channel and MSNBC joined the party in 1996, and the four stations have been cable’s primary all-day news sources for the last decade.

OK, back to the baskets. We can infer that cable news was a concept built around Tyndall’s first set of needs, news on demand. To be sure, in 2007 that duty has long since been relinquished to the Internet. That requires no further explanation, but has without a doubt dealt a significant blow to the cable news industry.

The second set of needs, crisis coverage, is one that will always draw viewers to cable news. During a crisis or major event, news consumers will willingly sacrifice the Web’s on-demand interactivity for television’s more passive, high-quality audio/visual coverage. The 2003 Iraq War gave the cable news networks their largest audience spike in recent memory, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2007 “State Of the News Media” report. Nielsen Media Research statistics show that overall cable news viewers nearly doubled during the month of Hurricane Katrina (September 2005) compared with the previous month. But in a business model, crisis coverage does not make for much of a programming strategy. For example, the PEJ report notes that 2006, short on big events and crises, yielded a drop in overall viewership for CNN Headline News.

Enter the third basket: personality, news and opinion programming. Given the state of the aforementioned sets of needs, it would seem inevitable—logical, even—that cable news executives would drive content in this direction. Incidentally, Fox News Channel, the long-standing viewership leader in cable news, boasts the heaviest lineup of personality-driven programs. In 2006, nine of the top 10 cable news programs, by audience, were Fox shows. Nine of the top 10. And all of them are personality shows. Of course, “The O’Reilly Factor” rules the roost, with “Hannity & Colmes” and “On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteran” rounding out the top three. That is a proven record of success, to say the least, for talk-show journalism. And whether they like it or not, MSNBC and the CNNs have no choice but to follow suit.

And they have. MSNBC has stocked its lineup with personality, particularly in the prime-time slots, where “Countdown with Keith Olberman” and “Live With Dan Abrams” abide. On CNN, it’s “Larry King Live” (the only non-Fox program in the top 10) and “Anderson Cooper 360.”

And even CNN Headline News, by original design merely a cyclical “jukebox” of news, gave itself a personality facelift in December 2006, adding lawyer Nancy Grace and uber-conservative radio man Glenn Beck. Two back-to-back hours of redundant, sensationalist drivel. And for dessert, “Showbiz Tonight,” from which you are actually more likely to derive some semblance of pertinent information.

But do they have to take it so far? Do they have to do it with such brash, combative drivel? Maybe they do. After all, it apparently is what we, the public, are demanding of them.

Even so, at some point between Britney’s baby fat and Nancy’s baby rants, you must be thinking to yourself, “Hey, where’s the news?”

Four minutes later, back from commercial break. Same headline and sub-head on the “bottom line”: “Dad Arrest: Drunk Driving, Baby Not Strapped In!” Same scrolling b-roll: the highway, a cop car, Dad’s mug shot. Four talking heads on the screen at once. God bless the mute button.