Daypart May Make More Difference than Network | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

March 15, 2004

While the journalistic makeup at the three cable channels is similar, it is a misleading to talk about cable news as if it were one seamless product. Rather, there are four distinct personalities to the cable news day- morning news, daytime, early evening and prime time. Except in the morning, they bear striking resemblances on all three channels.

Morning

The morning news, from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. (and until 10 a.m. on CNN), is one of the few periods when there are clear and measurable differences among the networks in their fundamental journalistic approaches.⁵

CNN's "American Morning" has more of a hint of a traditional news program. About 12 percent of the time is filled with packages by correspondents. Just 3 percent of the time is filled with anchor banter.

MSNBC's morning program is literally the Don Imus radio show put on television, with 25 percent of the time anchor banter and only 3 percent packages. It may make corporate sense for NBC News to devote such minimal resources to cable programming in this time slot since its biggest hit, the "Today" show, airs simultaneously on broadcast.

Fox News's morning show, "Fox and Friends," is a hybrid of a morning network television news show and a morning drive time radio show. There are virtually no story packages (1 percent of the time) and 18 percent of the time is anchor banter.

All three morning programs rely more heavily on interviews (39 percent at CNN, 45 percent Fox News and 47 percent for Imus at MSNBC) than in any other part of the day that was examined.

Cable Morning News, Story Type

Percent of All Time

Total CNN Fox News MSNBC

Edited Package 6% 12% 1% 3%

External Interviews 32 28 38 32

Internal Interviews 11 11 7 15

Standups 17 23 19 5

Anchor Reads 18 20 15 18

Live Events 2 4 2 1

Banter 14 3 18 25

External Source 0 0 0 0

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

Daytime

At midmorning (9 a.m., but 10 a.m. on CNN )⁶, the three cable channels convert to newsdesk programs following the handful of selected stories of the day, usually those with some visual component they can follow. This is the daytime part of cable, with generic, unpackaged content embodied in the programs' titles: CNN's "Live From…" or "Fox News Live" or "MSNBC Live." With more correspondents now working, and the news day in full swing, there is more use of reporter stand-ups, which make up a third of the daytime news hole. Anchor "tell" stories (even though they average just 30 seconds in duration) are now so numerous that they take up more total time than two-minute-plus taped reports. Interviews become less frequent than at any time of the day and anchor banter all but disappears.

Cable Daytime News, Story Type

Percent of All Time

Total CNN Fox News MSNBC

Edited Package 11% 14% 8% 10%

External Interviews 21 20 27 16

Internal Interviews 8 8 5 11

Standups 34 33 35 34

Anchor Reads 15 14 15 15

Live Events 10 10 9 11

Banter 1 1 * 1

External Source 1 1 1 1

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

Early Evening

As daytime programming switches to early evening, all three cable news networks adjust again.⁷ On all three channels, this is the time of day when traditional taped packages are most likely to air, but there are great disparities between their decisions about how prominently to use this format. CNN uses this format frequently (29 percent of the time, compared to 14 percent at Fox News and only 10 percent at MSNBC) in programs such as "Wolf Blitzer Reports," "Lou Dobbs Tonight" and "Anderson Cooper 360º."

Fox News uses this time period to showcase its panel of in-house experts (13 percent of the time, compared to 6 percent at CNN and 10 percent at MSNBC), the most notable fixture being Brit Hume's panel of political pundits on "Special Report."

By contrast, MSNBC's interview subjects tend to be guests rather than staffers (42 percent of the time, compared to 29 percent at CNN and 38 percent at Fox News). Chris Matthews'"Hardball" on MSNBC has an interview format to counterprogram Cooper on CNN and Smith on Fox News.

Cable Early Evening News, Story Type

Percent of All Time

Total CNN Fox News MSNBC

Edited Package 18% 29% 14% 10%

External Interviews 36 29 38 42

Internal Interviews 10 6 13 10

Standups 18 16 17 23

Anchor Reads 14 15 15 11

Live Events 1 1 2 2

Banter 2 4 * 1

External Source * 0 * 1

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

Prime Time

As the cable channels move into prime time, after 8 p.m., the term "cable news" is arguably something of a misnomer altogether.⁸ Few of the programs are newscasts in the traditional sense of the term. They might more accurately be described as talk radio on television - interview programs, often with people who are also radio talk show hosts during the day. CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" is the closest prime time cable comes to a conventional newscast.

Interviews with guests - newsmakers, celebrities, experts, political activists - begin to dominate. They are even more frequent than in the mornings (at CNN 45 percent of the time, at Fox News 46 percent and at MSNBC 55 percent). The content, moreover, switches from being driven by the day's headlines to topics chosen by the networks' interviewer-anchors such as CNN's Larry King, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough.

Cable Prime Time News, Story Types

Percent of All Time

Total CNN Fox News MSNBC

Edited Package 9% 20% 4% 6%

External Interviews 49 45 46 55

Internal Interviews 8 8 13 4

Standups 6 6 8 3

Anchor Reads 14 5 17 20

Live Events 13 17 13 12

Banter 0 0 0 0

External Source * * 0 *