Network TV Content, A Day in the Life

The evening network newscasts on May 11 followed the pattern we have seen in earlier years of featuring deeper sourcing than other kinds of national television. First, they featured more sources in their stories. Some 40% of nightly news stories contained four or more sources, compared with 23% on morning news and 12% on cable.

Total Number of Sources in News Stories

Looking more closely at the amount of information provided about these sources so audiences could judge what they were hearing and seeing, the evening newscasts (as well as morning) again outperformed cable. (At night, 37% of stories on the commercial networks contained at least two fully identified sources, as opposed to 31% on network morning shows and 12% on cable.)

But a new index we created this year that probes how much context stories offered — in effect how many questions about a story a segment explored — favored the morning news this day, not the evening.² Fully 39% of the major morning news stories that day touched on three or more potential elements of the events covered. On the nightly news, 27% of the stories answered three or more questions or story elements.

So the live-interview format of morning news may have limited how many sources citizens heard from, but the longer time devoted to the segments allowed room to cover more aspects of the story. In the morning those stories seemed to include looking for ways to connect people to the news in an emotional sense and, occasionally, to focus on what people themselves could do.