This reliance on taped packages and correspondents has consequences beyond style. The time involved in writing, editing and checking a story translates into more time to verify facts and more sources than can be found in other story forms, including live interviews. The power to check and to edit is important.
This is quantifiable in the sourcing measurements.
Unlike the live stand-ups, which are the staple format for cable news correspondents, these taped packages are more comprehensively sourced, with named and identified institutions and individuals, often in the form of direct quotations, soundbites from people whose inflection, mood, tone and sincerity viewers can assess directly.
To isolate this, the study examined how many sources a story cited, and whether those sources were named and their level of expertise and potential biases were described so that audiences could determine more for themselves how to evaluate the information.
The less transparency there was, the more audiences would have to accept the word of the news program that these sources were believable. At the bottom of the sourcing scale would be a story based on a lone anonymous source. At the top would be a story with at least four named and fully described sources.
Overall, the three commercial nightly newscasts had higher levels of sourcing on average than did other kinds of news programs. Nearly half of all stories (48 percent) had two or more fully named and described sources, and 18 percent cited four or more of these sources.
What about anonymous sourcing? Overall, less than a third (29%) of nightly news stories contained anonymous sources. Usually the networks made some attempt to describe these anonymous sources so that viewers could have some basis to judge their credibility. Only 14 percent of the stories had at least one anonymous source without any explanation of why the source was credible, such as "CBS has learned" or "sources tell ABC."
Story Length
For all that people complain about brevity on television news, network nightly newscasts tended to rely either on fairly long stories by modern standards or very short ones.
About half of all stories on the three commercial nightly newscasts, 52 percent, were more than 90 seconds while 42 percent were less than 40 seconds. Very few stories, just 6 percent, fell anywhere in between (41 seconds to 90 seconds), the type of truncated package that is a staple of some local television newscasts. The biggest difference between the commercial network news and the "NewsHour" was that the "NewsHour," following the format of the morning news, tended to do more very long stories. A third, 33 percent, of its stories were longer than three minutes. The bulk of these long stories, however, were interviews or panel discussion, which often provide in-depth discussions with a limited range of people. The downside is that these often replace edited packages, which are more densely sourced and written and are less vulnerable to an interview subject's filibustering.
Some in network news say that modern television news stories are probably more densely packed with information than were stories of similar lengths in earlier years. The new technology - satellites, video feeds, computer-generated graphics and more sophisticated editing equipment - allows producers and editors to more easily add more information from more sources. The technology also allows journalists to include more, pithier and shorter soundbites in stories rather than longer but perhaps longwinded ones. Modern audiences are also presumed to process information more quickly. In the period of film in television news, in the mid-1970s and earlier, there was less content available and what was available was more difficult to pack into pieces. As a result, television professionals argue, stories sometimes grew to fill the space.
Bush as Protagonist
For years critics also have argued that television has personalized news, causing journalists to build their stories more around people or institutions, and less around events. This was supposedly especially true of coverage of the presidency. The White House became a backdrop for the president. But even elsewhere, government stories became focused around a single personality, perhaps the mayor in a town, taking on the special interests. Politics became more personal. Television was a character-driven medium.
Does the 2003 content bear this out? To a large degree, no. In all, only 23 percent of evening news stories focused at least half of their content around a single personality, even less than newspapers (32 percent and 28% on newspaper front pages).