Newspaper Content, A Day in the Life

Finally, it is hard to generalize about how papers handled what emerged in our study as the top four stories of May 11 — the plane scare in Washington, the murder in Zion, Ill., the Michael Jackson trial and violence in Iraq.

The double murder in Illinois, a staple of network morning news, local TV, and cable, for instance, was a minor print story in the national papers, and no story at all in the local ones, except in Houston; the confessed killer had been a prisoner in the Texas system. In a similar vein, the Michael Jackson trial, the third most covered story over all and a staple on cable and network morning TV, was a minor inside story in print save for the Los Angeles Times, where the trial was local.

Treatment of Top Stories on May 11th

The other two top stories of the day were more likely to be covered by the newspapers. Those were terrorism in Iraq and the plane scare in Washington , but coverage varied by newspaper. The Iraq story was passed over largely by local TV, cable and morning news. Yet in the larger newspapers studied, it tended to be treated as significant. It led the New York Times, and was an inside story in the other national and metro dailies.

The only story to get a fair amount of coverage across print and broadcast was the day’s top story — the plane scare in Washington . It was the lead of the network evening news, and a dominant story on cable. And, as with the coverage of Iraq , it was a front-page story in the New York Times and an inside story in all the others.