Network TV Content, A Day in the Life

By 6:30 p.m. on May 11, not much new had happened that received significant coverage on television news in the intervening hours. Cable had been consumed largely by one event, a single-engine Cessna that had accidentally violated D.C. airspace and led to the brief evacuation of the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court, but not other federal buildings. The networks wouldn’t ignore the story.

But as it turned out, four of the five of the “news events” that the nightly newscasts covered at 6:30 had occurred the night before in the Middle East or Asia but had been skipped by the morning shows. The evening newscasts all did packages on violence in Iraq and brief tell stories on the protests in Afghanistan , and one did a brief tell story on threatening nuclear moves by North Korea .

Journalistically, timeliness was not something on May 11 that the nightly newscasts considered a prerequisite for something’s being news.

The news agenda was so starkly different between the evening and morning newscasts that just one story that had appeared in the first hour of “Good Morning America” would appear on ABC’s “World News Tonight” — even with the same anchorman on both newscasts that day Only two stories were repeated on CBS, and two on NBC.⁴

Only one of the nightly newscasts even mentioned the story that across all media in our sample was the fourth most heavily covered of the day that the actor Macaulay Culkin had testified at Michael Jackson’s molestation trial. The network was ABC, which did a 30-second anchor read.

Nor did any of the newscasts do anything with the No. 2 story of May 11 in the media generally, news of an arrest in a murder in Zion , Ill. , in which a father was accused of killing his 8-year-old daughter and her friend, supposedly for riding their bikes after he had grounded them. The case would consume several days on morning news. Records over the last year show it earned only a brief single mention on any evening newscast, a 20-second anchor read on May 10 on ABC.

The newshole on the nightly network newscasts on May 11 — the time for news after subtracting for promotions, teases, commercials, and the programs’ introductions and closes — was actually 19 minutes and 40 seconds on average. To fill that time, the commercial newscasts averaged 10 stories per program (10 on CBS, 11 on ABC, nine on NBC). Of those, three on average were anchor reads. Six were longer, taped packages. One segment on each program was a live interview with a correspondent or a newsmaker.

Perhaps to an even greater degree than we found in the mornings, viewers got strikingly similar information regardless of which of the three evening newscasts they chose. The likenesses so outweighed the differences that the biggest variable among the shows on this night was probably the differences in style and personality of the anchors, NBC’s Brian Williams, CBS’s Bob Schieffer and ABC’s Charles Gibson.

In the first two thirds of the newshole on May 11, the newscasts covered the same news, and in much the same way. In the remaining seven minutes, ABC and CBS had only one “package” that was unique to their newscasts. NBC had two, and all four were feature stories.

Network News Lead Stories, May 11, 2005

The Top Story: The D.C. Plane

Even though the scare was long over and cable news, particularly CNN, had given over most of the afternoon to it, all three commercial newscasts still chose to lead with the Cessna that wandered into restricted Washington airspace.

Indeed, all offered more than twice as much time to it than they did to any other story.

Each also began the same way, with a play-by-play retelling of the event. ABC and NBC even told the story nearly identically, with a minute by minute accounting: “11:59, the threat level at the White House and the Capitol is raised to yellow, the plane is just 15 miles away; 12:00 noon, two F-16s are scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base,” as NBC put it.

Each network also followed that with an anchor interview with one of its correspondents. Each interview tried to take a more focused look at one aspect of the incident.

That practice, of covering the lead story of the day with two or more substantial correspondent pieces, is something network evening newscasts have done since the technique was introduced by ABC News in the late 1980s. It is a way to go deeper into a story without running packages that run more than two or three minutes.

In tone, the stories on the network nightly news were also less congratulatory to the administration than the ones viewers might have seen on cable, a reflection of the fact that they contained more sources offering different perspectives.

Still, CBS was the lone network to explore whether the evacuation and response were appropriate given the potential threat, and the fact that the Air Force seemed to sense fairly quickly that the plane’s intrusion was an accident.

“Some aviation officials question the need for alarm, saying a plane as small as a Cessna could not cause significant damage or injuries,” the correspondent Bob Orr reported. “But one security official said, `The government had no choice but to treat this as an imminent threat.' Still another mocked the hair-trigger response, saying officials `are predisposed to overreaction. Evacuate first,' he said, `and try to figure it out later.'

“Beyond that, as it turns out, not everybody here in Washington was in the loop,” Orr continued. “For example, officials in charge of security at the Labor Department, right next to the Capitol, and other buildings say they knew nothing about the threat until the whole thing was nearly over.”

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The nightly news reports included more background and context than we found on cable, though less than online or print accounts. In our index measuring how much context a story contained, 4 of the 10 reports offered at least 2 of 10 possible elements on the plane story. On cable, despite its larger newshole, it was 10 out of 29 that offered that many.

Second Story

After leading with the plane scare, all three commercial evening newscasts followed with a slate of foreign stories, most of which the morning shows had skipped.

NBC and ABC each first offered a brief anchor read about the grenade incident (CBS passed) and then moved to more substantial coverage of the recent bombings in Iraq — the overnight news event the morning newscasts had ignored.

One criticism of the press is that it keeps focusing on such events, which may mask other, more positive news in Iraq . Another concern is that the incremental coverage of individual bombings may become numbing after awhile. Putting the larger picture together becomes daunting.

On this day, more than 12 hours after the incidents occurred, each of the three commercial networks tried to move beyond the news of the bombing itself. NBC addressed it briefly but mainly used it as a news peg to explore the reasons why violence in Iraq seemed to have escalated, “a particularly bloody illustration of just how serious the situation there is.” ABC used the day of violence as a hook to do a piece on why young men feel moved to become suicide bombers. CBS did a review of the day’s events, followed by a taped phone interview with the U.S. Army colonel in charge of the American offensive on Iraq ’s Syrian border.

ABC and NBC also aired another, related piece later in the newscast. ABC’s was the fourth segment in a series on dealing with pain — a joint project with USA Today — this one on the right way to treat pain from war wounds in Iraq . NBC did a feature on the death in Iraq of a Marine captain who had been part of the color guard that escorted the casket of Ronald Reagan.

Yet none of the pieces, even at lengths of two minutes, really answered the questions they were wrestling with. After two years of war, for example, the answer to why the violence continued and the recruiting of bombers thrived was ultimately probably too complicated for a two-minute story.

Terrorist activity in Iraq was a heavy news item for the evening news in 2005. Data from Andrew Tyndal’s ADT Research, which analyzes every night of the evening newscasts for the year, found that over all, the networks devotedapproximately 164 minutes of their time to reporting terrorist attacks in Iraq . That number, however, represented 8% of all the evening news coverage about Iraq . The lion’s share of Iraq coverage, 44%, was about U.S.-led combat operations. Incidentally, the amount of coverage of the situation in Iraq over all fell by more than a third in 2005 from a year earlier.

Pension Plans

The third correspondent package on each evening newscast was not among the four that dominated the news agenda in the media generally, though it might arguably have been one of the more far-reaching of the day. It was fallout from a bankruptcy judge’s decision to allow United Airlines to default on its pension plans.

The pension story was the only one to get substantial treatment in both morning and evening newscasts (an average of three minutes in the evening). Each report was an exploratory package on what was happening to pensions in America in the wake of the United Airlines ruling, and the capacity of the government’s Pension Guaranty Corp. to cover all the pensions corporate America had defaulted on.

Interestingly, that was probably the only story to get more substantial treatment on TV than in print.