2005 Annual Report - Network TV Content Analysis

The study in 2004 also looked more closely at coverage of the two major stories, the election and the war in Iraq. To do so, we grouped all the stories that related to those subject areas, even if they looked at a particular topic within them, say the environment and the election, so that we could get a clearer sense of election coverage overall. What did we find?

Election on the Nightly News

First, the tendency toward journalist opinion is even more apparent in campaign coverage than elsewhere.

In the three commercial evening newscasts, 44 % of election-related stories studied contained opinion, nearly triple the average for the evening news overall. The primary season was much more likely to feature journalists' opinions (63% of stories) than the general election (32%). That raises interesting possibilities. One is that journalists are more comfortable offering horse-race opinions than other types - as in "candidate X needs a win here Tuesday or he is in big trouble." Another is that journalists believe they have a greater responsibility to act as a referee and interject their own judgment because of the perceived level of spin or rhetorical license in modern campaigning. In fact-checking advertising or debate rhetoric, for example, journalists might consider it a strength to offer opinions. ABC News's political director, Mark Halperin, even warned staffers not to fall victim to "he said he said" journalism that created false equivalencies. Halperin instructed his reporters to use their judgment to point out when one side was engaging in distortions more often than another.

PBS was much more deliberate about keeping itself out of the stories - just two election stories carried judgment from the correspondent. Among the three network evening newscasts, NBC Nightly News looked much more like PBS than the other two. Just 19% (four stories in all) contained overt journalistic opinion. ABC's World News Tonight, on the other hand, included opinion in 68% of its election coverage, with CBS Evening News at 44%.

The morning news programs were more able than their evening counterparts to keep opinion out of their reporting, but less able than PBS. Roughly three-quarters, 76%, of their election stories were free of any journalist opinion, compared with 56% over all on commercial evening news and 84% on PBS.

Just as with the evening stories, the morning stories about the primaries had far more opinion. About 32% of 28 programs carried reporter speculation during the morning programs, compared to only 6% for the general election.

Tone of election coverage

Was the tone of the coverage more positive, more negative or reasonably balanced and neutral?

To try to get some answers, we created a way of quantifying the tone for stories about the war and the election. To derive tone, we first identified whether the story was about a particular newsmaker or issue. If so, each quote, innuendo, and assertion was counted as positive, negative or neutral for the story's main newsmaker, or in the case of an issue story, about moving toward resolution of the central issue.⁹

For stories to be considered positive or negative, one position must dominate by at least a 2:1 ratio. For example, if a story contained four positive sentiments, it must then contain at least eight negative statements to be considered negative in tone and no more than two negative statements to be considered positive in tone. In all other cases, the story would be labeled as neutral.¹⁰

What did we find?

Over all, campaign stories on the nightly newscasts tended to be either neutral or positive, rarely negative, according to the data. They were nearly three times as likely to be positive as to be negative for the principal newsmaker or issue. ABC was clearly the most positive of the bunch. NBC was the most neutral, and CBS fell in between.

Tone of 2004 Election Coverage

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding

On PBS, positive coverage dominated even more - 46% positive versus just 4% negative (1 story) and 50% neutral.

Morning News

And what of morning news? Our earlier observation about those programs' hope of provoking water-cooler debate was reinforced in the tone of their election coverage. Evenhanded neutrality was out of favor in the mornings. The segments were basically just as likely as their evening counterpart programs to carry a positive tone, 41% versus 40% for evening. But they were also nearly twice as likely to carry a negative tone, 32% to 18% for evening news. Basically, morning-news election stories were most likely not to be neutral. Many ascribe an upbeat tone to morning news programming. That is a misapprehension: lively controversy is closer to the mark.

Through the year, the Project did conduct two election-specific studies that allow some evaluation - one before the conventions and one during the debates - and both show President George W. Bush clearly getting the more negative coverage (see the PEJ studies Character and the Campaign and The Debate Effect).