Network TV Content, A Day in the Life

As the day began, all three morning newscasts skipped a series of major stories that had happened overnight and would become major news in the next day’s newspapers. In Iraq , for instance, a day of brutal bombings seemed to culminate two weeks of escalating terror and would lead the New York Times the next day. The morning shows referred to them only in passing. In Afghanistan , the worst anti-American protests since the overthrow of the Taliban had occurred in reaction to U.S. press accounts of treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay . That was also a Page 1 story in the papers the next day but absent from the morning shows.

At the same time, the three shows were also fairly similar in approach and even to some degree in what they did cover.

All gave a fair amount of attention, for instance, to the news that a day earlier the authorities in the former Russian republic of Georgia had found an unexploded

Top Story Treatment on Morning News May 11th

That story, about which the details were confused, was never more than an inside brief in any newspaper in our sample, at most a few paragraphs. Yet something about it made it more attractive for TV.

The three morning shows even agreed on how to cover the grenade story; they did so identically. Each began with a “live” report from a correspondent outlining the facts. Then each followed with an interview with, as it happened, the same person, a former Secret Service agent who now worked for Citibank. Thus in the end, each of the reports heard from basically one source, the consultant. Everything else was filtered through the correspondent.

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Despite the similarity in style, however, the facts of this story were conflicting and differed from network to network. The crowd the president spoke to seemed to vary in size — it was 50,000 on ABC and then also 150,000. It was 100,000 on CBS. The hand grenade was “not operational” on ABC, but it apparently was operational and was “later rendered safe” on NBC. Was it a Soviet-made grenade, sounding distinctly military? Or was it an engineering grenade for demolition purposes? Or a dummy used for training that was not actually explosive? Had people seen it thrown, as one account put it, or was it found and possibly missed in an earlier security sweep, as another suggested? The answers differed depending on which program one watched.³

The seriousness of the incident was also a little hard to determine, and the networks seemed unsure themselves how to portray it. Pierre Thomas on ABC said “something very scary may have happened.” Bill Plante on CBS said, “It could have been fatal if detonated at close range, but the Georgian security chief says the president was in no danger and that it was unlikely that the grenade would have been detonated.” In other words, it wasn’t close enough to the president to be fatal and the grenade couldn’t detonate. And viewers who watched NBC would have learned that the President was surrounded by bulletproof glass in any case — even if the grenade had been operational, and if it had gone off, he would not have been harmed. The only real danger, the segment said, would have arisen if the grenade had been meant to create a diversion for some more serious attack.

One problem appeared to be that the Georgian authorities offered differing details of the event, but the network accounts didn’t make that clear. Instead, the journalists themselves tried to appear more certain, as if they didn’t want to acknowledge that they didn’t know.

Another quality of the stories was that each wanted to focus on the potential danger and sense of alarm. Yet even those two elements, which apparently were what made this story a lead, were somewhat hypothetical. There was no alarm at the time since the administration wasn’t informed of the grenade until hours later, and the danger was unclear because it was unclear at the time if this was a working grenade, or a dud or a dummy. (In the end it was determined to be a live grenade that did not explode.)

The morning shows all gave a good deal of attention to the murder in Zion , Ill , too. And they handled this story similarly. Two of the three did it with a live interview —the same person, Michael Waller, the prosecuting attorney from the Lake County state’s attorney’s office.

The facts this time did not differ. The main distinction among programs was that CBS and NBC — especially NBC — strove to emphasize emotion by repeating key adjectives. The “Today Show” told viewers in rapid succession that the case was “shocking… horrific… horrible…horrific…unbelievably brutal…disturbing…absolutely horrific.”

CBS told us it was “shocking…horrific…brutal…”

The habit of having anchors and reporters tell people how to react was a feature not only of this story but of others, too, on morning news. Certain words applied to several stories, among them “shocked”… “alarmed” ... “stunned” … “disturbed.” In its first five stories this day, CBS used 11 such terms, and NBC 17. ABC engaged in this technique less than the others.

The terms showed up in three distinct ways. Anchors and reporters would use them in the setup or introduction of the story. Soundbites in taped stories were selected in which sources used the words. Or anchors would react after a story was over by using some of the terms as a kind of coda.

On May 11, such stories as the murder in Zion (all three networks), the story of a woman who had a needless mastectomy because her medical records had been mislabeled (NBC), the story of a woman who had been killed on an amusement ride (ABC), the case of a man whose young daughter was murdered by a sex molester living next door (CBS), and the story of a new ATM scam (ABC) all featured such emotive keywords.

In our first two years of this report we found that the morning shows were more likely to emphasize stories about lifestyle, celebrity, and crime than the networks’ evening newscasts. May 11 followed that pattern. Of the 18 story topics that were covered with more than a brief mention in the first hour of the three morning shows, five dealt with foreign affairs or terrorism, three with domestic or economic issues, six with crimes or terrible accidents, and four with celebrity/entertainment subjects.

Network Morning News Lineups