2005 Annual Report - Cable TV Content Analysis

Look closely at the content of cable news and it becomes clear that its appeal is its ubiquity and convenience; the medium does not come close to delivery on the potential of its depth or breadth.

• The reporting is measurably thinner than the other forms of national television news studied. Its stories are more one-sided and have fewer sources, and audiences are told less about those sources than in network evening or morning news or PBS.

• The thinness of the reporting on cable can be attributed partly, but only partly, to its abandoning written, edited stories in favor of live anchor interviews and reporter standups.

• These tendencies are even more acute in certain kinds of programming, particularly during prime-time talk shows and dayside news programming.

• Content analysis reveals clear differences overall between the three channels. Fox is more deeply sourced than its rivals, but it is also more opinionated and more one-sided, though one of the programs studied defies that generalization.

• CNN is the least transparent about its sources of the three cable channels, but more likely to present multiple points of view and more disciplined about keeping journalistic opinion out of its reporting.¹

Those are some of the key findings of the Project's new two-pronged approach to examining cable news. As we did last year, we first studied five sample days of each of the three cable news networks for sixteen hours each day, or 240 hours of programming. That provided us with a sense of the types of stories and the level of repetitiveness that appeared over the course of a cable news day.

In addition, this year we selected three different types of programs from each of the three channels to study for twenty days to see how their choice and treatment of topics compared with other media studied the same days. The programs studied included one prime-time talk show, one daytime news show and the closest each news channel comes to producing a traditional evening newscast. That added up to 180 more hours of programming involving another 4,551 stories.

Repetition vs. Updating

Although cable news purports to provide continuously updated coverage of breaking news, the idea that it is "following" stories and adding new information through the course of the day is in the main an illusion.

In the course of sixteen hours of viewing starting at 7 a.m. for five separate days, most of the stories on cable news (67%) are the same matter turned to repeatedly, and only 10% add meaningful updates with substantive new information.

In other words, 60% of all stories aired on cable through the day are simple repetition of the same information. Just one in three stories in the course of a cable day is new, or something not aired earlier.

Those figures are nearly identical to what we found last year, when 68% of the stories were repetitious, just 5% contained any substantive updates, and 27% were completely new.

What does that mean? With hours of air time and numerous correspondents, resources are devoted much less to gathering new information, or going deeper with background reporting, than to being live and appearing to be on top of three or four big stories of the day.

Repetition on Cable News

Percent of all stories from 7A.M.-11P.M.

Breadth of Topic

The consequence is a notably limited breadth of reporting. In all, the three cable programs we followed over twenty days tended to cover a narrower range of topics even than network evening newscasts -- and far less than online or print. Cable news spends a smaller percentage of its time than does network evening news covering government and, perhaps even more notably, roughly half as much time covering the broad range of domestic issues, from the environment, to transportation, health care, social security, welfare, education, economics, technology, science and more.

In contrast, lifestyle, entertainment and celebrity -- topics virtually nonexistent on nightly newscasts or the front pages of newspapers -- are the largest topic group on cable news. And that holds true even though the amounts vary across the range of program types. For instance, collectively, science, technology, and business made up just 2% of the time studied over twenty days, and the range of domestic issues, from education to the environment to health care, made up 11%. Celebrity, lifestyle and entertainment made up nearly a quarter of the time (23%).