One more quick one – some analysis from a professor of media studies at UNC-Chapel Hill:
March 14, 2005
What You See (Hear) Is What You Get
An enormous new study is out on “The State of the Media,” ( http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2005/index.asp ) with more material than you could possibly chew over in a day. It’s a bonanza.
But of all this massive amount of data, what is it that the nation’s premiere media reporter chooses to focus on for the lead of his piece?
You guessed it: that which can be interpreted as making Fox look biased.
[i]In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says.
By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists’ own views.
These findings – the figures were similar for coverage of other stories – “seem to challenge” Fox’s slogan of “we report, you decide,” says the Project for Excellence in Journalism.[/i]
And that, of course, is his headline, “On Fox News, No Shortage of Opinion, Study Finds.” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32631-2005Mar13?language=printer )
Only after that does he proceed to point out:
In a 617-page report, the group also found that “Fox is more deeply sourced than its rivals,” while CNN is “the least transparent about its sources of the three cable channels, but more likely to present multiple points of view.”
In fact, if you go to the appropriate section of the report ( http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2005/narrative_cabletv_contentanalysis.asp?cat=2&media=5 )(not that any of the news reporting on the study is of any help in locating it) you find a few more interesting tidbits.
One, by the way, is that my persistent complaint that “live trumps all” on cable is backed up by the numbers.
What does that mean? With hours of air time and numerous correspondents, resources are devoted much less to gathering new information, or going deeper with background reporting, than to being live and appearing to be on top of three or four big stories of the day.
Furthermore:
In contrast, lifestyle, entertainment and celebrity – topics virtually nonexistent on nightly newscasts or the front pages of newspapers – are the largest topic group on cable news. And that holds true even though the amounts vary across the range of program types. For instance, collectively, science, technology, and business made up just 2% of the time studied over twenty days, and the range of domestic issues, from education to the environment to health care, made up 11%. Celebrity, lifestyle and entertainment made up nearly a quarter of the time (23%).
It’s unfortunate that they didn’t compare that across the networks.
Now, as to Fox vs. CNN:
[i]Fox was measurably more one-sided than the other networks, and Fox journalists were more opinionated on the air. The news channel was also decidedly more positive in its coverage of the war in Iraq, while the others were largely neutral. At the same time, the story segments on the Fox programs studied did have more sources and shared more about them with audiences.
CNN tended to air more points of view in its stories than others, and its reporters rarely offered their own opinions, but the news channel’s stories were noticeably thinner in the number of sources and the information shared about them.[/i]
Where’s the newsflash here? Fox had more sources, and was clearer about who those sources were, permitting the audience the opportunity to decide for itself how to evaluate their claims. CNN had fewer sources (if more points of view) but they weren’t giving the audience much information about who those were.
Fox was more positive.
Excuse me, but, uh, where’s the news there? Hasn’t the debate for well over a year been over whether or not the mainstream media, exclusive of Fox, has been too relentlessly negative? Now a study comes out saying the mainstream outlets are more negative than Fox and that’s taken as evidence of some kind of bias? It’s just confirmation of what we’ve been debating all along.
[i]Fully 38% of Fox segments were overwhelmingly positive in tone, more than double the 14% of segments that were negative. Still, stories were as likely to be neutral as positive (39%) and another 9% were multi-subject stories for which tone did not apply.
On CNN, in contrast, 41% of stories were neutral in tone on the 20 days studied, and positive and negative stories were almost equally likely – 20% positive, 23% negative. Some 15% were multi-faceted and not coded for tone.[/i]
Exactly.
The big complaint is that Fox reporters and anchors are offering opinions, and this contradicts their slogan.
I have to admit, I’m a little amused by this. We all sort of know that the whole “fair and balanced” thing is tongue and cheek at best. But check this out:
[i]Those findings seem to challenge Fox’s promotional marketing, particularly its slogan, “We Report. You Decide.”
Some observers might argue that opinions clearly offered as such are more honest than a slant subtly embedded in the sound bites selected or questions asked. But that was not the case here. Given the live formats on cable, the opinions of reporters and anchors are often embedded in questions or thrown in as asides. Only occasionally were they labeled as commentary.[/i]
Why does this invalidate the slogan? Because hearing David Asman say, “oh, that’s great news,” will so color my attitudes that I’ll be incapable of deciding the issue on my own, poor little sheep that I am?
Yeah, that’s me – and the rest of the American public.
Just no will of my own. And that’s David Asman. Mr. Charisma, he is.
Update: Just to prove there’s cherry picking going on here, take a look at the way Reuters (via Memeorandum) frames their coverage of the study – to them its about bias in election coverage, with a completely secondary mention of whether one network or the other is more or less positive in its war coverage. ( MyWay )
Meanwhile, these print outlets are entirely ignoring all of the study’s findings on print. Isn’t that interesting.