Every Thanksgiving break I come back from a week at home thankful for one simple thing – cable TV.

My parents say they don’t spend enough time watching basic TV stations to justify spending more money on cable channels.

Whatever they want to think. What it means is that when I go back to Edgewood I don’t have any access to the basic cable channels I enjoy here in Ames.

Besides the expense of renting movies to replace the cable movie channels, being limited to basic TV stations also makes it very difficult to watch the news.

Every morning I wake up, make some coffee and watch CNN’s morning news program as I get ready to go to campus. Since it isn’t an option at my parent’s house, I tried to substitute other media for my morning dose of news.

Unfortunately the Des Moines Register doesn’t reach my house in northeast Iowa until about noon and the local National Public Radio station isn’t always clear.

I had three options left – the “Today” show on NBC, “Good Morning America” on ABC and “The Early Show” on CBS.

So Monday morning I made my coffee and went downstairs ready to devote my morning to watching the news.

I turned off the TV after about 30 minutes of flipping through the channels in frustration, looking for the news and finding nothing but segments on cooking, new movies and interviews with TV sitcom stars.

Where was the news part of these news programs?

Members of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a journalism think tank, are wondering the same thing.

The group recently did a study focusing on the content of news programs at ABC, NBC and CBS, which concluded that all of them had become “a kind of sophisticated infomercial.”

Not counting commercials and local news segments, the study found that one-third of the programs’ content was basically trying to sell something, whether it be a book, movie or TV program.

I knew there was a reason the “Early Show” on CBS spent so much time talking about “Survivor.”

The study also found that – surprise, surprise – corporate owners benefited the most from their news programs’ promotions.

To be exact, NBC’s corporate owner, General Electric, receives 12 percent of the product promotions on the “Today” show and ABC’s owner, Walt Disney Co., receives 21 percent from “Good Morning America.” CBS’s “Morning Show” comes in on top, with 27 percent of its promotions stemming from its parent company, Viacom.

As could be expected, executive producers for the programs aren’t happy with the study’s conclusions. Steve Friedman, producer for the “Early Show” on CBS, said morning shows are “not the evening news” and think tank participants don’t understand the “world of morning television.”

The “world of morning television”? I thought it was a news program.

Self-promotion is a key part in the success of any business. The Daily runs in-house advertisements on its pages every week, promoting some new project or feature we want our readers to know about. It’s just good business.

But there is a limit.

When there are so many advertisements that the Daily’s pages don’t have room for stories, in-house ads are sacrificed to save space.

It’s time for “the world of morning television” to do the same.

In its effort to promote its stations’ latest sitcom and drama episodes, it is sacrificing its primary purpose – providing the news.

Andrea Hauser is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Edgewood. She is editor in chief of the Daily.