Wrecks, Lies, and Videotape (Rating the 11 O'Clock News)

People from many different political persuasions criticize the media on the basis of story content, making arguments regarding bias. But it's equally important to analyze the lack of content in many television news shows. A comparison with news broadcasts coming out of Canada or England and Europe with American shows will leave the average American amazed at the very high noise:signal ratio of our local commercial TV news.

MediaWatch carried out a survey during the month of April of the 11 o'clock news broadcasts for the local news stations on channels 4 (ABC), 5 (NBC), 7 (indep.), and 11 (CBS), tabulating the average percentages of a 35 minute broadcast that were devoted to various subject categories. Five broadcasts were observed with a stopwatch for each station, and the number of minutes devoted to Sports, Weather, Advertising, "coming up next" teaser shown just before commercials, News, and Human interest fluff were recorded.

Because this informal study was designed to gauge the signal to noise ratio for different stations, the news category was subdivided into the areas of Crime-related stories (shootings, kidnappings, bank robberies), Disasters (floods, tornadoes, children fallen down wells), International News, and General News, which is ostensibly the most significant 'real' news.

News stations have a responsibility to act as a judicious filter of the news of the day, and should prioritize what deserves to be shown. Usually, the stations were given the benefit of the doubt in these admittedly arbitrary categories. The JonBenet Ramsey case was considered to be crime rather than fluff. The Heaven's Gate story was considered news on the first day, and, along with any O.J. stories, was considered human interest after that. Any health related stories, ranging from breast cancer to diet tips, were counted as news. Any story concerning Liz Taylor, and any other segment that quite arguably should have been restricted to a separate news magazine type program, including stories about the houses of the Star 101.5 DJs (a radio station owned by the same company that owns Channel 4), children with cancer, kids having a tricycle race, and celebrity gossip, were counted as human interest fluff.

Percent of 11 o'clock broadcast devoted to topic areas

 
4.          5.          7.         11. 
----        ----        ----        ---- 
Ads           31.7 %      32.3        33.4        28.9 
Pre-ads        2.8         2.8         4.6         2.9 
General News  11.4        16.5        16.6        11.9 
Crime         11.9        14.2         8.4         9.3 
Disasters      8.6         3.9         2.8        10.8 
Int'l News     --          --           .5          .6 
Sports        13.3        10.7        13.0        16.8 
Weather        9.5        10.9        11.3         9.2 
Fluff         10.8         8.0         9.3        10.0 

The results of this survey can be summarized by stating that all the stations devoted approximately the same percentages of the total broadcast to the various subcategories, with an almost appallingly small amount of time devoted to important news. Channels 5 and 7 were marginally better than channels 4 and 11 in the prioritization of their news.

Each station has a fairly strict formula that it follows from day to day, devoting exactly the same amount of time to advertising or the sports segment every day. There is slightly more variation for the news categories, where some days quite a lot of time will be devoted to the big disaster story of the day, and on other "slow" news days they will resort to covering politics. Commercials are often crowded in towards the end of the broadcast, preceded by teasers to keep people from switching the channel.

Channel 11 had the fewest commercial seconds, but devoted six minutes to sports on average, and had little in depth or investigative news reporting. Of all the stations, Channel 4 had the greatest "if it bleeds, it leads" focus on flashy or bloody disaster images. Channel 5 has a lot of advertising but scored points for having a better prioritization of news stories. Channel 7 (KIRO-TV) has up to 2 minutes of pre-advertising teaser per broadcast, but they win the award for including the most serious news, while trimming out excessive blood-and-guts crime stories. Unfortunately, later this month KIRO-TV, under new owners, resumes CBS affiliation and has cancelled its hour-long 10 o'clock newscast. At the same time, Channel 11, which loses CBS, will also cut back on much of its news schedule.

The busy person who watches television news for reasons of limited time should consider doing a cost-benefit assessment of their time spent watching the TV news vs. reading a newspaper or listening to radio. At most, less than 1/5 of the half hour broadcast consists of any real news. Reporters speak at word per minute rates much slower than the average person can read (~120wpm vs. 300-600wpm), thus magnifying the shortage of details that can be provided in television coverage; and precious seconds devoted to a story can be given to fatuous dialogue between reporter and anchor. ("So, Biff, is everything calm tonight?" "Yes, Suzie, but what happens tomorrow remains to be seen. Back to you." "Ha, ha, ha. Thanks, Biff!") Individuals can control their time and decide what they wish to skip over when they read a newspaper. Ten minutes spent scanning a paper on the bus every morning may prove to be much more informative, on the whole, than watching the news every night.

A wonderful mega-web site full of cogent news analysis can be found at http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~mernst/media/