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Content Analysis
The most notable finding here is that cable news has all
but abandoned what was once the primary element of television
news, the written and edited story. In doing so, it has de-emphasized
the story package's strengths, namely the chance to verify,
edit and carefully choose words and pictures. The stress in
cable news is on mmediacy and cost efficiency of the live
interview and unedited reporter stand-up.
Next, rather than covering a comprehensive menu of issues,
each morning the cable channels settle on a limited number
of core stories that are then repeated, and only occasionally
substantively updated, as the day proceeds. The level of repetition
on cable is enormous. The level of updating is minor.
There are four distinct parts to the cable day -- morning
news, daytime, early evening and prime time -- and each has
different qualities. Prime time is remarkable for the fact
that, for channels label themselves news, it is almost totally
bereft of newscasts. If viewers wanted a comprehensive prime
time survey of the national and international news of the
day on these cable channels, only CNN offers such a newscast,
and then for only one hour of its prime time schedule.
While there are differences among the three cable channels,
the similarities in how they are put together and what they
choose to cover stand out.
The dominant impression is that managers in the control
room, rather than the on-air talent, function as the real
agents of influence in cable. They decide what pictures to
air, what stories to cover, where to go next, who gets to
express expert knowledge and analysis. They define the personality
of the product.
To get a sense of the nature of cable news, the study looked
at five sample days for the three cable news networks, CNN,
Fox News, and MSNBC, and studied those five days intensively,
for 16 hours each day, or 240 hours of programming, some 5,570
story segments.
This intensive approach, examining days in depth over many
hours, allowed researchers to get a sense of how cable news
is constructed throughout the day. More conventional studies
have tended to examine short periods of time on cable, usually
a single program, over a longer number of days, the way that
traditional network evening newscasts are studied. This conventional
approach, while useful, leaves too much of the cable day unexamined.
For this study, instead, one of each of the five weekdays
was selected at random from May to October of 2003.
For those dates, our partner, ADT Research, publisher of the
Tyndall Report, monitored and coded the cable programming
continuously from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time.
The abandonment of the written edited story
The most striking finding is the means by which cable news
now communicates information.
Of the 240 hours of programming studied, only 11 percent
of that time and 8 percent of the stories consisted of written
and edited packages.
This makes cable news markedly different from most other
forms of journalism, including nightly news, television documentaries,
newspapers, the Internet or even local television. On the
commercial broadcast networks' nightly newscasts, packages
occupy 84 percent of their editorial time.
Instead, 62 percent of the time on cable is conducted in
"live" mode. Most of this is conducted through interviews,
usually by anchors. A third of the cable news day (32 percent)
is devoted to interviews conducted with newsmakers, outside
experts, celebrities or ordinary people. Another 9 percent
is devoted to question-and-answer sessions with the cable
channels' own in-house analysts, experts and staffers.
Story Types on Cable News
Percent of All Time
| |
Percent
|
| Edited Package |
11%
|
| Interviews |
41
|
| Standups |
21
|
| Anchor Reads |
15
|
| Live Events |
8
|
| Banter |
3
|
| External Source |
1
|
What then is the reporter's role on cable news? Mostly it
is to do live reporter stand-ups--continuous talking, unedited
and unpunctuated by soundbites from any other source. In all,
reporter stand-ups made up 21 percent of the entire cable
news hole.
This tendency is drastically different than commercial nightly
news. There live stand-ups take up only 2 percent of the time.
A further 15 percent of cable time is spent with anchors
narrating video or doing "tells," reading copy without
pictures.
Live events themselves, such as those covered by C-SPAN,
are not a significant part of cable news, at least during
the time-period sampled. Only 8 percent of the time in the
sample was made up of live events.
Crosstalk, or banter between anchors or between anchors
and correspondents, was negligible (3 percent) and almost
entirely confined to morning programming.
Taken together, this emphasis away from edited stories and
toward interviews and stand-ups has two important implications.
One is it de-emphasizes the role of the reporter. Cable
is increasingly becoming an anchor medium, in stark contrast
to where it began, and this is particularly true in the morning
and evening.
Second, the majority of time on cable is something close
to a first draft, or in the case of interviews, news gathering
in the raw. Both live interviews and stand-ups are produced
without any chance to edit, and usually with limited or no
time to write.
Correspondents talk either extemporaneously or from notes
on a legal pad, something akin to what dictating once was
in newspapers. On TV, however, there is no rewrite man or
woman on the other end of the phone to clarify and verify.
In a sense, that is left to the audience.
The average reporter stand-up was 130 seconds, a little
over two minutes, and just 12 seconds shorter than the few
edited packages. Talking for that length of time without interruption,
usually extemporaneously, says researcher Andrew Tyndall,
tends to make talkativeness and telegenicity major virtues
for cable correspondents. Traditional journalism skills such
as writing, editing, cultivating sources andwriting to pictures
tend to become less important. Indeed, the requirement that
reporters be so frequently available during the day to do
these repetitive stand-ups necessarily eats into the time
that they otherwise would have to be in the field collecting
information and talking to sources. Everything is filtered
through the reporter since audiences cannot hear or see sources
for themselves in soundbites.
On the relatively few occasions when cable stations presented
written and edited packages, they tended to be less densely
packed with information than on broadcast nightly newscasts.
For instance, on the three commercial networks and the PBS
"NewsHour," 47 percent of the stories cited at least
two separate named and identified sources, while only 24 percent
of stories on cable had that level of sourcing.
Cable packages were also slightly shorter than on network
nightly news, with an average length of 142 seconds, versus
164 for nightly news on broadcast television.
Though less densely sourced than network packages, packages
on cable, rare as they were, were still more heavily and clearly
sourced than cable's more dominant methods of communicating
-- interviews or stand-ups. Take, for instance, the difference
between packages and reporter stand-ups on cable. Only 15
percent of cable stand-ups cited at least three fully identified
sources, whereas 35 percent of their edited packages contained
that density of sourcing. Furthermore, any source cited in
a stand-up is not quoted in the form of a soundbite that audiences
can see and hear for themselves. Instead, their words are
characterized second-hand by the reporter.
Average Story Length on Cable News
Length in Seconds
| |
Seconds |
| Edited Package |
142 |
| Guest Interviews |
249 |
| Corresp. Interviews |
194 |
| Stand-ups |
130 |
| Anchor Reads |
30 |
| Live Events |
558 |
Interviews, the primary and most detailed means of communicating
in cable, averaged more than six minutes in length. They also
offer audiences the chance to assess a source for themselves.
The problem, though, is that that may be the only source heard
from in a piece, the only point of view offered.
Even these totals for named and identified sources, however,
slightly overstate the degree to which cable reporters engage
in first-hand reporting. We took a three-day subsample to
examine the extent to which the cable news networks use other
journalistic organizations as sources rather than checking
with primary sources directly. We found that 11 percent of
all named and identified sources cited by the three cable
news channels were actually other news organizations (CNN
cited 144 news organizations among its 1,131 separate sources;
Fox News 104 of 1,049; MSNBC 108 of 997).
Immediacy and Updating
The second major finding about cable is the limited breadth
of the cable news agenda and the limited amount of updating.
Considering all the time cable news has to cover global
developments across any number of beats and subject areas,
each day's news agenda was narrowly defined, determined in
the morning and largely just replicated thereafter.
In the course of 16 hours of viewing starting at 7 a.m.,
three-quarters of the stories on cable throughout the day
(73 percent) are the same matter turned to repeatedly.
The cable channels would have you believe that these stories
they turn to again are developing stories they are following
and updating through the course of the day. It turns out that
is not the case.
The content analysis found that only 5 percent of the stories
returned to during the day contained substantive new facts.
In other words, 68 percent of the stories on cable news
were segments that repeated the same information without any
meaningful new information.
Sometimes these stories are returned to with peculiar urgency,
with labels describing them as breaking news, despite little
of substance changing. This seemed to be particularly the
case if there was a new picture of some kind. It is not unusual,
for instance, to see moments, such as one in December on CNN,
when a Santa Barbara, Calif., prosecutor was followed getting
out of his car, walking up the sidewalk and into a building
without saying a word. Yet the footage carried the header
"Breaking News: Jackson Prosecutor Arrives at Court Building."
Such images are often little more than what television people
call "B-roll," the raw footage that camera crews
shoot through the course of the day, being put out on the
air live. What were once the raw ingredients that made up
journalism, the grist that was ground down into on-air material
with the chaff discarded, now are the product. It is the television
set as "feed room."
Other times, the cable channels decide to repeat stories
but make them look new. They return, for example, to another
live stand-up by a White House correspondent who again delivers
reaction to economic figures released earlier in the day,
even though the reaction is the same one the correspondent
described an hour earlier and could just have easily have
been taped and rerun. This repetition looks more immediate
because it is live and because the correspondent does not
explain that the reaction came earlier in the day. The anchors
often introduce these segments as going back for "the
latest" rather than as repetition. It takes some decoding
by the audience to recognize that there is nothing new here.
Topics
What is the news agenda on cable?
Here conclusions must be tentative because the study examined
a large number of hours, but only over five days. The extreme
frequency of story repetition in a day, moreover, makes the
diversity of topics even more limited.
Most striking is what was missing. There were only a handful
of programs organized around specialized news beat areas.
These included CNN's "Inside Politics" and "Lou
Dobbs Tonight" (economics), Fox's "On the Record"
(crime) and MSNBC's "Abrams Report" (crime).
On the weekdays we studied, none of the three cable networks
produced any programs devoted to in-depth coverage of any
other specialized areas, social issues or other domestic or
international themes. There are no designated programs, for
instance, on healthcare, the environment, arts and culture,
religion, travel education or the family. The headline-driven
story selection criterion at each cable network determined
that these beats were covered only scantily if they did not
happen to surface as headline stories.
Topics on Cable News
Percent of All Time
| |
Total |
CNN |
Fox |
MSNBC |
| Government |
29% |
22% |
28% |
31% |
| Foreign Affairs/Military |
22 |
24 |
21 |
21 |
| Defense |
2 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
| Domestic |
6 |
7 |
8 |
5 |
| Business/Commerce |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
| Crime |
11 |
10 |
12 |
9 |
| Science/Tech. |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
| Celebrity/Enter. |
7 |
7 |
5 |
8 |
| Lifestyle |
9 |
9 |
9 |
9 |
| Accidents/Disasters |
10 |
13 |
9 |
8 |
| Other |
3 |
3 |
2 |
4 |
In our sample, for example, the limited nature of topics
can be seen even more clearly if we look at just one area,
domestic affairs. The subcategories of public health, education,
the environment, the health care system, and transportation
accounted for just 2 percent of the time on the three cable
channels. Terrorism accounted for double that.
Here is another way to look at it. If people had watched
one of these cable channels for the entire 16 hours, they
would have in the course of the full day seen:
-
Two minutes about education
-
One minute about the environment
-
One minute about healthcare
-
Four minutes about the arts and culture
-
Two and a half minutes about science
-
Half a minute on medical research
-
Just under four minutes on transportation
-
Six minutes on family and parenting issues
Given that most people do not watch a cable channel for 16
hours a day, in practical terms they saw virtually nothing
about these areas.
In contrast, on a given day, watching for 16 hours, they
would have seen:
-
More than an hour of crime news
-
One hour of accidents and disasters
-
53 minutes of lifestyle coverage
-
41 minutes of celebrity/entertainment news
-
An hour and 35 minutes about politics
-
Two hours and 17 minutes about Iraq
Differences In Cable Networks
Much of the popular discussion of cable surrounds the question
of ideology, and whether Fox News is, as advertised, fairer
and more balanced than the other networks or, as some critics
allege, it is a more ideologically conservative network.
This study does not attempt to quantify this. Ideology,
to some degree, is in the eye of the beholder and is a difficult
matter to pin down with numbers.
But a close look at the journalistic makeup of cable news
suggests that the more manifest "Fox Effect" on
cable news is economic - an orientation toward using fewer
people to produce news by focusing on fewer topics, doing
fewer edited stories and airing more live reports.
CNN was more likely to do taped packages (18 percent of
total airtime versus 8 percent for MSNBC and Fox News). This
is especially true during early evening, when CNN's "Politics
Today" and "Lou Dobbs Tonight" are shown. During
that time, 29 percent of the CNN news hole is edited packages
(compared with 14 percent taped packages in the early evening
on Fox News and 10 percent on MSNBC).
By contrast, voiceover videotapes, reports in which the anchor
comments while the screen shows silent video, are a specialty
of Fox News. In the course of a day, Fox News presents an
average of 11 each hour (CNN and MSNBC each average eight),
reaching a dizzying peak in the anchor Shepard Smith's "Fox
Report," whose hour contains a daily average of 46 voiceovers,
as many as ABC's Peter Jennings would deliver in 10 half-hour
newscasts.
Story Types on Cable News
Percent of All Time
| |
CNN |
Fox News |
MSNBC |
| Edited Package |
18% |
8% |
8% |
| External Interviews |
28 |
36 |
33 |
| Internal Interviews |
8 |
9 |
10 |
| Standups |
22 |
22 |
20 |
| Anchor Reads |
13 |
15 |
16 |
| Live Events |
8 |
7 |
8 |
| Banter |
2 |
3 |
4 |
| External Source |
0 |
1 |
1 |
Beyond that, however, the similarities among the networks
are bigger than the differences. The topics on the three networks,
for instance, are remarkably similar. And, the three networks
are virtually indistinguishable in the level of repetition,
the percentage of new stories through the course of the day
and the level of substantive updates.
They are virtually identical in the level of national versus
international stories.
They are also similar in the sourcing of their stories.
At each of the networks only between 22 and 26 percent of
their segments cited and identified at least two named sources.
They differed little in the use of anonymous sourcing. At
CNN and Fox News, about a quarter of the stories (23 percent
each) relied on anonymous sources. The number was only slightly
lower at MSNBC, 19 percent.
Daypart May Make More Difference Than Network
While the journalistic makeup at the three cable channels
is similar, it is a misleading to talk about cable news as
if it were one seamless product. Rather, there are four distinct
personalities to the cable news day- morning news, daytime,
early evening and prime time. Except in the morning, they
bear striking resemblances on all three channels.
Morning
The morning news, from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. (and until 10 a.m.
on CNN), is one of the few periods when there are clear and
measurable differences among the networks in their fundamental
journalistic approaches.
CNN's "American Morning" has more of a hint of
a traditional news program. About 12 percent of the time is
filled with packages by correspondents. Just 3 percent of
the time is filled with anchor banter.
MSNBC's morning program is literally the Don Imus radio show
put on television, with 25 percent of the time anchor banter
and only 3 percent packages. It may make corporate sense for
NBC News to devote such minimal resources to cable programming
in this time slot since its biggest hit, the "Today"
show, airs simultaneously on broadcast.
Fox News's morning show, "Fox and Friends," is
a hybrid of a morning network television news show and a morning
drive time radio show. There are virtually no story packages
(1 percent of the time) and 18 percent of the time is anchor
banter.
All three morning programs rely more heavily on interviews
(39 percent at CNN, 45 percent Fox News and 47 percent for
Imus at MSNBC) than in any other part of the day that was
examined.
Cable Morning News, Story Type
Percent of All Time
| |
Total |
CNN |
Fox News |
MSNBC |
| Edited Package |
6% |
12% |
1% |
3% |
| External Interviews |
32 |
28 |
38 |
32 |
| Internal Interviews |
11 |
11 |
7 |
15 |
| Standups |
17 |
23 |
19 |
5 |
| Anchor Reads |
18 |
20 |
15 |
18 |
| Live Events |
2 |
4 |
2 |
1 |
| Banter |
14 |
3 |
18 |
25 |
| External Source |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
Daytime
At midmorning (9 a.m., but 10 a.m. on CNN ),
the three cable channels convert to newsdesk programs following
the handful of selected stories of the day, usually those
with some visual component they can follow. This is the daytime
part of cable, with generic, unpackaged content embodied in
the programs' titles: CNN's "Live From…" or
"Fox News Live" or "MSNBC Live." With
more correspondents now working, and the news day in full
swing, there is more use of reporter stand-ups, which make
up a third of the daytime news hole. Anchor "tell"
stories (even though they average just 30 seconds in duration)
are now so numerous that they take up more total time than
two-minute-plus taped reports. Interviews become less frequent
than at any time of the day and anchor banter all but disappears.
Cable Daytime News, Story Type
Percent of All Time
| |
Total |
CNN |
Fox News |
MSNBC |
| Edited Package |
11% |
14% |
8% |
10% |
| External Interviews |
21 |
20 |
27 |
16 |
| Internal Interviews |
8 |
8 |
5 |
11 |
| Standups |
34 |
33 |
35 |
34 |
| Anchor Reads |
15 |
14 |
15 |
15 |
| Live Events |
10 |
10 |
9 |
11 |
| Banter |
1 |
1 |
* |
1 |
| External Source |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
Early Evening
As daytime programming switches to early evening, all three
cable news networks adjust again.
On all three channels, this is the time of day when traditional
taped packages are most likely to air, but there are great
disparities between their decisions about how prominently
to use this format. CNN uses this format frequently (29 percent
of the time, compared to 14 percent at Fox News and only 10
percent at MSNBC) in programs such as "Wolf Blitzer Reports,"
"Lou Dobbs Tonight" and "Anderson Cooper 360º."
Fox News uses this time period to showcase its panel of in-house
experts (13 percent of the time, compared to 6 percent at
CNN and 10 percent at MSNBC), the most notable fixture being
Brit Hume's panel of political pundits on "Special Report."
By contrast, MSNBC's interview subjects tend to be guests
rather than staffers (42 percent of the time, compared to
29 percent at CNN and 38 percent at Fox News). Chris Matthews'"Hardball"
on MSNBC has an interview format to counterprogram Cooper
on CNN and Smith on Fox News.
Cable Early Evening News, Story Type
Percent of All Time
| |
Total |
CNN |
Fox News |
MSNBC |
| Edited Package |
18% |
29% |
14% |
10% |
| External Interviews |
36 |
29 |
38 |
42 |
| Internal Interviews |
10 |
6 |
13 |
10 |
| Standups |
18 |
16 |
17 |
23 |
| Anchor Reads |
14 |
15 |
15 |
11 |
| Live Events |
1 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
| Banter |
2 |
4 |
* |
1 |
| External Source |
* |
0 |
* |
1 |
Prime Time
As the cable channels move into prime time, after 8 p.m.,
the term "cable news" is arguably something of a
misnomer altogether.
Few of the programs are newscasts in the traditional sense
of the term. They might more accurately be described as talk
radio on television - interview programs, often with people
who are also radio talk show hosts during the day. CNN's "NewsNight
With Aaron Brown" is the closest prime time cable comes
to a conventional newscast.
Interviews with guests - newsmakers, celebrities, experts,
political activists - begin to dominate. They are even more
frequent than in the mornings (at CNN 45 percent of the time,
at Fox News 46 percent and at MSNBC 55 percent). The content,
moreover, switches from being driven by the day's headlines
to topics chosen by the networks' interviewer-anchors such
as CNN's Larry King, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Joe
Scarborough.
Cable Prime Time News, Story Types
Percent of All Time
| |
Total |
CNN |
Fox News |
MSNBC |
| Edited Package |
9% |
20% |
4% |
6% |
| External Interviews |
49 |
45 |
46 |
55 |
| Internal Interviews |
8 |
8 |
13 |
4 |
| Standups |
6 |
6 |
8 |
3 |
| Anchor Reads |
14 |
5 |
17 |
20 |
| Live Events |
13 |
17 |
13 |
12 |
| Banter |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
| External Source |
* |
* |
0 |
* |
Management -- The Control Room as Star
Much of the commentary and analysis about the cable news
networks performed by others has focused on teasing out the
underlying political ideology informing what stories they
select to cover, what journalistic angles they choose to emphasize
and what personnel they hire as correspondents and in-house
experts.
This analysis was designed to examine those same decisions
but to inspect them instead according to journalistic criteria.
What we have found is a series of decisions that strengthen
management's control over content and weaken autonomous decision-making
by reporters.
On cable, whoever runs the control room is the star, more
than the anchor and certainly more than the correspondent-producer
team gathering news in the field.
This is manifest in many ways. It begins with the limited
number of stories that the cable channels actually follow
at length. Control goes to whoever makes the decision about
what those stories will be. The control room makes the decision
about what pictures will run over the correspondents' stand-ups,
and thus at least half of viewers' impressions, whereas in
a more story-driven medium, such as nightly news, the correspondents
and their producers choose the pictures to illustrate their
pieces. The notion from network nightly news, of the anchor
as the "managing editor" of the newscast, being
involved in decisions about story lineup, correspondent assignments
and more along with the executive producer, is unthinkable
in this live format, and unworkable. The exception is the
prime time program - more interview than news program - in
which the star anchor is the central figure.
These trends are true at all three cable channels. In some
small ways, however, it might be argued that Fox News keeps
somewhat tighter editorial control on the content of its interviews
than its rivals. Fox, for instance, devotes more time to questions
and answers with in-house experts than it does with "outsiders,"
interview subjects who are not on the payroll.
The whole picture, at all three networks, is ofa medium
with enormous time to fill, with a great deal of repetition
and perhaps with an impression of immediacy that is greater
than reality. Viewers get closer to the raw elements that
once went into journalism rather than what, in other forms
of television news, was once considered the end product.
Click
here to view footnotes for this section.
Click
here to view content summary tables.
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