Cable TV Content Analysis

Evening News

CNN

On CNN, the prime time evening newscast with Aaron Brown featured 10 different pieces on the Washington false alarm involving the Cessna. They included an opening piece by Brown that narrated events as they unfolded, pieces by CNN correspondents reliving those 15 minutes from their eyewitness vantage points on Capitol Hill and the White House, interviews with people from the airport where the flight originated, a close look at that type of plane and even a trip on a simulated patrol of a plane being hijacked — what could have happened if the event had not been the false alarm that it was.

For all the time devoted to the incident, however, and all the hours since it had happened, the reporting suffered from many of the tendencies we have identified elsewhere with cable news. There was a heavy reliance on government sources such as the White House spokesman Scott McClellan as well as on CNN’s own correspondents as eyewitness sources. And the primary expert relied on throughout the coverage, the CNN “security analyst” Richard Falkenrath, a former deputy homeland security adviser, clearly identifies himself as a member of the extended homeland security family, whom he refers to as “we.” “Now, that’s not to say that we didn’t make the right decision today to evacuate,” he told Aaron Brown.

Though on the surface it might seem as if Brown’s program amounted to an hour on the subject, the newscast did not have the feel of long-form or in-depth journalism. It was rather a series of short pieces, each with fairly limited reportage, as if the reporters who were on air all day were simply asked to file one more piece for the late show.

The few segments that tried to go beyond the basic play-by-play failed to go very far. A piece by Jeanne Meserve, for example, was introduced as a look at whether the new warning system for pilots could have prevented the incident. The segment never answered the question. Instead it mostly addressed the mechanics of the alarm. What’s more, viewers were told nothing about the sources used, two pilots and someone from the Air Force — their backgrounds, any connections they had or the level of their expertise.

Cable Evening News: Lead Stories and Type of Coverage

Fox

As with Fox’s morning show, “Special Report with Brit Hume” spoke largely to viewers interested in political events, but Hume’s range of issues was actually wider. In addition to the plane scare and the Iraq bombings, viewers could also hear about North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons; voter fraud; the resignation of a church pastor over a politically motivated sermon, and a forthcoming vote in Canada. News of the Illinois double murders and the Jackson trial, which had dominated the mid-day, were absent.

The reports themselves were produced in a manner much closer to that of traditional broadcast news. As we found in last year’s analysis of a month’s worth of Hume programming, viewers heard from a variety of sources and correspondents.

The lead plane-scare story — a taped report from Brian Wilson — contained five different sources (though one was the correspondent Major Garrett, who was evacuated from the White House press room). The tone of the piece was more measured than the bulk of the CNN coverage, assuring viewers that all was well with the government. The first line from Hume let viewers know the scare was over: “The White House and the U.S. Capitol are back to normal tonight after a midday security scare. . .” The other piece on the plane story that hour, an interview with the NORAD spokesman Col. Keith Snyder, paints a calmer picture as well. Hume opens, “Well, as everyone knows, the threat turned out to be a little mosquito of an airplane that had no hostile intent and probably couldn’t have done much damage even if it slammed into the Capitol. . .” View Hume Video Clip (Get Quicktime® Plug-in)

The correspondent reports on Hume’s program had a somewhat more balanced feel than other Fox programming — the plane-scare story suggested that the evacuation might have been disorganized, for instance — yet even on this program the reporter roundtable that made up the second half of the program as well as some other feature stories tipped toward a decidedly conservative viewpoint.

An item in Hume’s “Political Grapevine,” for instance, cited a new report from Milwaukee , WI that found hundreds of ineligible felons had voted in the last election, and then paired that finding with an unrelated study from Washington State showing that felons in that state had voted Democratic by 3-1.

MSNBC

Viewers of MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” the closest the network comes to a main evening newscast, heard about a greater number of news items that day than from any other program studied, much as was the case on MSNBC earlier in the day. Yet aside from the main stories of the day --— the plane scare,

Iraq , Zion and Jackson — the items were mostly anchor reads of two or three sentences each by Olbermann, usually filtered through his own “take.” In some ways “Countdown” is a hybrid of a news program and a talk show — it is Olbermann on the news.

“ Spain has the annual running of the bulls at Pamplona . We now apparently have the annual running of the evacuees around the Capitol,” he quipped to MSNBC’s chief Washington correspondent, Norah O’Donnell. View Olbermann Video Clip (Get Quicktime® Plug-in)

Olbermann was a little more sober-minded in the second segment, an interview about the plane scare with Roger Cressey, a former member of the National Security Council but now a “terrorism analyst” for MSNBC and NBC. Cressey, perhaps more than any other source quoted at length on cable this day, admired the administration’s response. And that is the only viewpoint offered to the audience. Indeed, no one we encountered identified as a cable news analyst offered anything but praise for his former agency.

Olbermann: Break the day down into its critical components from your perspective, and give each of these components a letter grade, if you’d be so kind.

Cressey: Well, I think Secret Service and the Capitol Police, they’d get high marks because they did the notification quickly, people moved quickly. I think NORAD and the air defense infrastructure worked well. I also give high marks to the Customs police and others around. I give low marks to the pilot, of course.”

Olbermann offers three separate pieces on the Culkin testimony that day — a straight news account in a package by the NBC correspondent Karen Brown, a discussion with Jim Moret of “Inside Edition” about the defense’s portrayal of Jackson as “a 10-year-old child star trapped in a 46-year-old man’s body,” and a sarcastic segment in which Olbermann is auctioning off a “Michael Jackson Puppet” on eBay. Some of the material on Olbermann’s show has aired before. The segment on the Iraq bombings, for instance, is a replay of the report by Richard Engel from NBC Nightly News.