Cable Channel

The CBS Sports Network does some drum beating for March Madness Monday night with " The Miracles : The 1988 Kansas Jayhawks," a documentary about how an underdog team won the national championship that year. Known as Danny and the Miracles, because of star Danny Manning, Kansas upset the Oklahoma Sooners for the championship. There are a couple of local angles worth noting in the film that marks the 25th anniversary of that championship. One of the producers is Tamiko Bullock, a graduate of Morgan State University.

ABC announced plans yesterday to launch an all-news cable channel to compete with CNN starting in 1997, a move industry analysts say is a sign that the future of television news lies in 24-hour programming on cable.With yesterday's announcement, ABC becomes the third network planning an all-day cable news broadcast. Fox announced a similar plan last week, as did NBC in January. An NBC spokesman said yesterday that details of their plan will be released early next year.Money is the reason networks are going into the 24-hour cable news business.

UPDATES with reaction to the film from Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's office... Using digitalmedia once again to end run the cable TV industry, Al Jazeera English posted its latest documentary, "Baltimore: Anatomy of an American City," online Tuesday morning. The film will premiere on the channel at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, with multiple plays throughout the week. I believe it's outrageous that cable TV operators have kept the channel off its systems in cities like Baltimore, despite stellar coverage of major stories in the Middle East and endorsements ranging from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the leading academic experts and authors on global media.

HBO has already delivered the year's most powerful documentary in Spike Lee's soul-stirring chronicle of Katrina and its aftermath, When the Levees Broke. Tonight, the premium cable channel hits it out of the park again with Hacking Democracy, a timely and chilling look at alarming problems in the way our votes are counted. It is hard to imagine any network or cable channel offering a documentary this season that is more important to the civic life of the nation -- let alone one that is so compelling and ultimately moving.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy MSNBC has long been as bad as Fox News when it comes to ideological bias. But with the hiring of longtime Team Obama loyalists David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, it's official: MSNBC is worse. The cable channel that flies under the banner of NBC News is now all but a bona fide organ of state propaganda, an information channel that speaks in the same dominant voice as the folks running the government -- and tries to mask what it is up to. I didn't plan on getting all free-press-and-democracy amped up about the hirings until I saw Axelrod with Andrea Mitchell last week in his first appearance on MSNBC.

The premiere of Over There, cable channel FX's drama about the war in Iraq, was seen by 4.1 million viewers Wednesday night, making it one of the 10 highest-rated debuts in the history of basic cable and the highest rated series of the night on cable TV. The series from Steven Bochco and Chris Gerolmo, the first prime-time drama to depict an ongoing war, scored with young viewers drawing an audience of 2.4 million viewers 18 to 49 years of age. ...

Soap opera fans unable to watch ABC dramas during the daytime will soon be able to watch them at night, when Disney and ABC launch a 24-hour soap opera channel.The new venture, scheduled to launch in mid-January, will offer up same-day reruns of "All My Children," "General Hospital," "One Life to Live" and "Port Charles" in prime time and a mix of movies and original fare the rest of the day.The concept is the result of tests ABC conducted last year in Chicago and Houston, during which the daytime series were rerun on a cable channel at night.

This week, The Sun's Television Book is getting a brand-new look. It will include more channel listings on redesigned program grids to make it easier to find the shows you want. To accommodate increased listings, a single Television Book will cover the entire state rather than individual viewing areas. Channel lineups will be found in a conversion chart at the back of the book. No matter where you are, you'll find the right listings for your cable system. We hope you find the new Television Book useful.

Where last year's Disney Channel movie sensation, High School Musical, aimed to be fun for everyone, the sequel that debuts on the cable channel Friday is designed from top to bottom for true believers. This movie is for devotees who've memorized every moment of the original and want nothing more than to relive it, for those waiting and craving for hottie Troy and cute Gabriella and conniving Sharpay to be just as hot, cute and conniving as they were before, only more so. On TV High School Musical 2 airs at 8 p.m. Friday on the Disney Channel.

Cable channel FX has found a ratings winner in Black.White., a new reality series featuring middle-class families switching racial identities with the help of Hollywood makeup experts. The series produced by rapper Ice Cube and documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler drew the most young viewers for a premiere in the history of cable TV Wednesday night. (Its audience of 2.8 million viewers 18-to-49 tied MTV's The Osbournes premiere on March 5, 2002. The 18-to-49 demographic is the most desired in television.