Network TV Content, A Day in the Life

The architecture of network TV news is a holdover from another time, an age when news consumption was something that occurred only at home — at breakfast and after work.

The way the news broke on May 11 revealed how network journalists work within that structure.

The most heavily covered story of the day, a private plane in Washington, D.C.’s “No Fly” zone, happened at noon, after the morning news shows were off the air and six and half hours before the evening newscasts.

Violence in Iraq , another of the major stories, had happened overnight. A third, an arrest in an Illinois double murder, was announced before that.

Would the evening news skip some of those stories because they were old? Or delve more deeply into them because there was more time for reporting? In the 21 st century, is time an enemy of good journalism or an ally?

A close examination of one Day in the Life of the News found:

• Time slot rather than network seems to define news judgment. There was little overlap in what was covered between the morning newscasts and the evening. And that was less because new events had overtaken the news than because of the starkly different definitions of news between the types of programs.
• Morning news programs build stories around emotion, though that varies somewhat by network. One way of doing so is by interviewing “average” people involved in the news and asking them how they feel rather than merely what happened. Another method is to have anchors and reporters lace their openings and closes with emotional keywords — “stunning…horrifying…horrific” and phrases such as “a serious warning every parent needs to hear” — as if trying to tell viewers how they should feel about these stories. In the first five stories this day, we found more than 30 cases of such terms among the three programs.
• The commercial evening newscasts are so strikingly similar to each other that on this day the first 12 minutes of news time on the three programs covered the same stories.¹ By the shows’ end, ABC and CBS had only one “package” that was unique to their newscasts, NBC had two, and all four of the “exclusives” were feature stories. The main distinguishing characteristic of the programs was the personality of the anchor.
• The “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” on PBS, seems increasingly distinctive now in television news in its definition of news and its treatment. On this day, it did not cover any of what proved the top four stories in the rest of the media landscape, beyond in its brief news summary. It was the only daily outlet not to. Instead, in its six stories, it offered more that was exclusive than any other national television program studied, and in the one story it covered that was widely reported elsewhere, its longer treatment meant it offered a more complete and nuanced account.

In the end, citizens would get in the 30 minutes of the three nightly commercial newscasts roughly as great a range of topics as they would from cable over four hours — and the programs averaged just 10 stories each. Yet the stories seem so attenuated on these nightly newscasts that it is less clear how much viewers retain, and fewer angles on the stories are explored than in the morning.

In the first two years of this report, we examined network news by looking at a randomly constructed month of programming. That allowed us to look at the broad contours of the network news — how many stories were on different topics, what was the general nature of the reporting, etc.

We found that morning news, the economic powerhouses at NBC and ABC, are interview-based programs, with a “softer” news agenda and stories with a more limited range of sources and viewpoints than many other media. Evening news, which still commands the biggest audience at any given moment, has a more “hard news” agenda. The reporting is generally deeper, and the stories are still told through taped, edited “packages” reported by correspondents, where the facts are double-checked and the pictures and words carefully matched.

This year, we examined one day, May 11, in detail. For network news, that meant closely studying what appeared in the first hour of the three morning shows, and in the evening scrutinizing the three commercial network evening newscasts and PBS’s “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” We studied the day two ways — quantitatively, breaking it down by the numbers, and qualitatively, watching the stories and forming more specific impressions based on individual stories. First, the numbers.