PEJ: Watching A Day Of Cable News

The Project for Excellence in Journalism isn’t fond of cable news. In its cable television intro, The State of the News Media 2006 says:

“For the third straight year, our content analysis of cable suggests that it is thinly reported, suffers from a focus on the immediate, especially during the day, is prone to opinion mongering and is easily controlled by sources who want to filibuster. All of these raise questions about whether cable news will suffer if audiences begin to feel more comfortable with video and text on news websites as a substitute for getting instant news on television.“

Some of the comments in the May 11 content analysis are worth highlighting:

> “For much of the day, cable anchors function more like traffic cops than investigators.”

> “The more we study, the more the cable channels begin to look distinct from one another. On May 11, indeed, they differed more in what they covered than the broadcast networks did. On CNN, the plane scare was dominant. Fox focused more on the grisly murder case in Illinois. MSNBC was the most interested of the channels in Macaulay Culkin’s testimony at Michael Jackson’s molestation trial, a story, interestingly, that its sister broadcast, the NBC Nightly News, didn’t even mention.”

> “Another difference on Fox in the morning is that it has abandoned the more disinterested neutral voice of traditional broadcasting. It is a clearly American channel, with the U.S. government frequently referred to in the first person plural — ‘we’ and ‘us.'”

Here’s the Cable TV section of the report…