2004 Annual Report - Cable TV Content Analysis

Much of the commentary and analysis about the cable news networks performed by others has focused on teasing out the underlying political ideology informing what stories they select to cover, what journalistic angles they choose to emphasize and what personnel they hire as correspondents and in-house experts.

This analysis was designed to examine those same decisions but to inspect them instead according to journalistic criteria. What we have found is a series of decisions that strengthen management's control over content and weaken autonomous decision-making by reporters.

On cable, whoever runs the control room is the star, more than the anchor and certainly more than the correspondent-producer team gathering news in the field.

This is manifest in many ways. It begins with the limited number of stories that the cable channels actually follow at length. Control goes to whoever makes the decision about what those stories will be. The control room makes the decision about what pictures will run over the correspondents' stand-ups, and thus at least half of viewers' impressions, whereas in a more story-driven medium, such as nightly news, the correspondents and their producers choose the pictures to illustrate their pieces. The notion from network nightly news, of the anchor as the "managing editor" of the newscast, being involved in decisions about story lineup, correspondent assignments and more along with the executive producer, is unthinkable in this live format, and unworkable. The exception is the prime time program - more interview than news program - in which the star anchor is the central figure.

These trends are true at all three cable channels. In some small ways, however, it might be argued that Fox News keeps somewhat tighter editorial control on the content of its interviews than its rivals. Fox, for instance, devotes more time to questions and answers with in-house experts than it does with "outsiders," interview subjects who are not on the payroll.

The whole picture, at all three networks, is ofa medium with enormous time to fill, with a great deal of repetition and perhaps with an impression of immediacy that is greater than reality. Viewers get closer to the raw elements that once went into journalism rather than what, in other forms of television news, was once considered the end product.