The War on Terrorism

The study examined the three network evening news programs and three network morning news shows weekdays from January 1 - April 5, 2002. The specific programs studied were ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC's Good Morning America, The CBS Early Show, and NBC's Today Show. [Note: Only the first two hours of the Today were coded to match the other morning show time periods.] All topic breakdowns were based on data compiled by media researcher Andrew Tyndall for the Tyndall Report. The Project then adapted Tyndall's research to the topic breakdowns it has used in earlier studies. For the evening news programs, the study included all news segments 30 seconds or longer. For the morning shows, the study monitored all packaged and live segments outside the local newsbreaks.

Intercoder Reliability

Intercoder reliability measures the extent to which individual coders, operating independently of one another, reach the same coding decision. In adapting the data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, tests were performed throughout the project. When necessary, the coding supervisor reviewed decisions on content variables to be sure coders were in agreement.