2004 Annual Report - Cable TV Content Analysis

The second major finding about cable is the limited breadth of the cable news agenda and the limited amount of updating.

Considering all the time cable news has to cover global developments across any number of beats and subject areas, each day's news agenda was narrowly defined, determined in the morning and largely just replicated thereafter.

In the course of 16 hours of viewing starting at 7 a.m., three-quarters of the stories on cable throughout the day (73 percent) are the same matter turned to repeatedly.

The cable channels would have you believe that these stories they turn to again are developing stories they are following and updating through the course of the day. It turns out that is not the case.

The content analysis found that only 5 percent of the stories returned to during the day contained substantive new facts.

In other words, 68 percent of the stories on cable news were segments that repeated the same information without any meaningful new information.³

Sometimes these stories are returned to with peculiar urgency, with labels describing them as breaking news, despite little of substance changing. This seemed to be particularly the case if there was a new picture of some kind. It is not unusual, for instance, to see moments, such as one in December on CNN, when a Santa Barbara, Calif., prosecutor was followed getting out of his car, walking up the sidewalk and into a building without saying a word. Yet the footage carried the header "Breaking News: Jackson Prosecutor Arrives at Court Building."

Such images are often little more than what television people call "B-roll," the raw footage that camera crews shoot through the course of the day, being put out on the air live. What were once the raw ingredients that made up journalism, the grist that was ground down into on-air material with the chaff discarded, now are the product. It is the television set as "feed room."

Other times, the cable channels decide to repeat stories but make them look new. They return, for example, to another live stand-up by a White House correspondent who again delivers reaction to economic figures released earlier in the day, even though the reaction is the same one the correspondent described an hour earlier and could just have easily have been taped and rerun. This repetition looks more immediate because it is live and because the correspondent does not explain that the reaction came earlier in the day. The anchors often introduce these segments as going back for "the latest" rather than as repetition. It takes some decoding by the audience to recognize that there is nothing new here.