2005 Annual Report - Network TV Content Analysis

Those who get their news in the morning, even during the first hour with its harder-news orientation, get a very different agenda. Morning news may be holding on to its audience while evening news is losing, but it is remarkably lighter fare, more focused on a handful of major crime stories and one or two big breaking-news events each day. What's more, much of the coverage of Iraq, the year's biggest story, consisted of so-called "Yellow Ribbon Journalism," according to Andrew Tyndall - human-interest coverage of men and women in service or on the homefront, rather than military policy or diplomacy.

The most striking change in 2004, as was true in the evenings, was the large spike in government stories.

The picture may be somewhat misleading, though. While technically accurate, much of the uptick in government coverage came from two groups of stories - involving the war in Iraq and a series of high-profile crime cases - that might strike many as more fundamentally about Iraq, about crime and about celebrity.

The Iraq-related stories included the dispute over weapons of mass destruction and the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal, which made up fully a third of all the government stories.

The second big cluster involved three court cases - Martha Stewart, Scott Peterson, Kobe Bryant - which were shifted from being counted as celebrity scandals in 2003 to being legal stories in 2004 as they wended their way through the justice system. They accounted for another third of all the morning government stories.

If those two groups of stories are subtracted, the level of governmental stories in the morning would have been 7%, not statistically different from the 8% a year earlier. And if the war in Iraq had remained in the category of foreign stories, that category would have been 3% compared to 5% from the previous year.

Thus the shifts reflect changes in the news - and in particular changes in the nature of a handful of stories - but not, apparently, any major changes in the nature or focus of the morning programs themselves.

How Morning Shows Change Over the Hour

The study this year also reveals some nuances about how the nature of morning news changes as the programs progress each day. First, we can clearly see that the traditional notion about morning news - that the first hour is more hard-news oriented - is better understood as just the first half-hour. Hard-news topics on the morning shows in 2004 were usually concentrated into the first 20 minutes of the program (not including local news breaks or commercials).

In this first block of the programs, government topics led, accounting for 22% of all stories (and again celebrity crime stories made up a quarter of those). Domestic affairs, such as health care or domestic terrorism, accounted for another 16%, with foreign affairs at 9% and election news at 8%. In all, roughly seven out of ten stories in the first half-hour are so-called traditional hard-news topics.

Lifestyle features such as the Early Show's story about what to do if someone sees a child getting into a car with an intoxicated adult and Today's story about how "The Vagina Monologues" promotes awareness of violence against women rarely air in these first minutes - just 16 such stories in all for the 20 days studied.

In the second half-hour, the array of coverage offered is already quite different. Government stories drop by nearly half (to 12% of all stories), and foreign affairs and election news are largely absent. Lifestyle features increase (to 15%), and celebrity stories to 12%. The biggest category, though, is the miscellaneous event, accounting for a full 29% of all stories in this half hour. These stories often have little connection to other current events. They are "interesting features" such as a story about an attack by an escaped gorilla at a Dallas zoo or a story on ABC's Good Morning America about the luxury liner Queen Mary 2.

Placement of Morning News Stories

Those findings match those of Tyndall Research, which uses a different methodology and somewhat different topic definitions. Excluding the news summary at the top of the hour, Tyndall found that 75% of the interview/segments are devoted to hard-news topics in the first half-hour, dropping to 39% in the second 30 minutes.