2004 Annual Report - Cable TV Content Analysis

The most striking finding is the means by which cable news now communicates information.

Of the 240 hours of programming studied, only 11 percent of that time and 8 percent of the stories consisted of written and edited packages.

This makes cable news markedly different from most other forms of journalism, including nightly news, television documentaries, newspapers, the Internet or even local television. On the commercial broadcast networks' nightly newscasts, packages occupy 84 percent of their editorial time.

Instead, 62 percent of the time on cable is conducted in "live" mode. Most of this is conducted through interviews, usually by anchors. A third of the cable news day (32 percent) is devoted to interviews conducted with newsmakers, outside experts, celebrities or ordinary people. Another 9 percent is devoted to question-and-answer sessions with the cable channels' own in-house analysts, experts and staffers.

Story Types on Cable News
Percent of All Time

	Percent
Edited Package	11%
Interviews	41
Standups	21
Anchor Reads	15
Live Events	8
Banter	3
External Source	1

Total may not equal 100 due to rounding.

What then is the reporter's role on cable news? Mostly it is to do live reporter stand-ups--continuous talking, unedited and unpunctuated by soundbites from any other source. In all, reporter stand-ups made up 21 percent of the entire cable news hole.

This tendency is drastically different than commercial nightly news. There live stand-ups take up only 2 percent of the time.

A further 15 percent of cable time is spent with anchors narrating video or doing "tells," reading copy without pictures.

Live events themselves, such as those covered by C-SPAN, are not a significant part of cable news, at least during the time-period sampled. Only 8 percent of the time in the sample was made up of live events.

Crosstalk, or banter between anchors or between anchors and correspondents, was negligible (3 percent) and almost entirely confined to morning programming.

Taken together, this emphasis away from edited stories and toward interviews and stand-ups has two important implications.

One is it de-emphasizes the role of the reporter. Cable is increasingly becoming an anchor medium, in stark contrast to where it began, and this is particularly true in the morning and evening.

Second, the majority of time on cable is something close to a first draft, or in the case of interviews, news gathering in the raw. Both live interviews and stand-ups are produced without any chance to edit, and usually with limited or no time to write.

Correspondents talk either extemporaneously or from notes on a legal pad, something akin to what dictating once was in newspapers. On TV, however, there is no rewrite man or woman on the other end of the phone to clarify and verify. In a sense, that is left to the audience.

The average reporter stand-up was 130 seconds, a little over two minutes, and just 12 seconds shorter than the few edited packages. Talking for that length of time without interruption, usually extemporaneously, says researcher Andrew Tyndall, tends to make talkativeness and telegenicity major virtues for cable correspondents. Traditional journalism skills such as writing, editing, cultivating sources andwriting to pictures tend to become less important. Indeed, the requirement that reporters be so frequently available during the day to do these repetitive stand-ups necessarily eats into the time that they otherwise would have to be in the field collecting information and talking to sources. Everything is filtered through the reporter since audiences cannot hear or see sources for themselves in soundbites.

On the relatively few occasions when cable stations presented written and edited packages, they tended to be less densely packed with information than on broadcast nightly newscasts. For instance, on the three commercial networks and the PBS "NewsHour," 47 percent of the stories cited at least two separate named and identified sources, while only 24 percent of stories on cable had that level of sourcing.

Cable packages were also slightly shorter than on network nightly news, with an average length of 142 seconds, versus 164 for nightly news on broadcast television.

Though less densely sourced than network packages, packages on cable, rare as they were, were still more heavily and clearly sourced than cable's more dominant methods of communicating -- interviews or stand-ups. Take, for instance, the difference between packages and reporter stand-ups on cable. Only 15 percent of cable stand-ups cited at least three fully identified sources, whereas 35 percent of their edited packages contained that density of sourcing. Furthermore, any source cited in a stand-up is not quoted in the form of a soundbite that audiences can see and hear for themselves. Instead, their words are characterized second-hand by the reporter.

Average Story Length on Cable News
Length in Seconds

	Seconds
Edited Package	142
Guest Interviews	249
Corresp. Interviews	194
Stand-ups	130
Anchor Reads	30
Live Events	558

Interviews, the primary and most detailed means of communicating in cable, averaged more than six minutes in length. They also offer audiences the chance to assess a source for themselves. The problem, though, is that that may be the only source heard from in a piece, the only point of view offered.

Even these totals for named and identified sources, however, slightly overstate the degree to which cable reporters engage in first-hand reporting. We took a three-day subsample to examine the extent to which the cable news networks use other journalistic organizations as sources rather than checking with primary sources directly. We found that 11 percent of all named and identified sources cited by the three cable news channels were actually other news organizations (CNN cited 144 news organizations among its 1,131 separate sources; Fox News 104 of 1,049; MSNBC 108 of 997).