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'State of the Media: Cable TV

The "television news medium of choice" for many Americans is cable, and in particular, CNN.

"Yet all is not so rosy," say the authors of the State of the News Media 2004 report. The growth of core audiences may have peaked, and "the age of innovation and investment in new kinds of programs or people that characterized cable news is no more."

Cable viewers often find "newsgathering in the raw: live interviewing illustrated by unedited videotape, extemporaneous reporting with little time to write or consult sources... Hour after hour, across all parts of the day, cable television news features constant repetition, a narrow news agenda, an obsession with headlines, scanty sourcing and little autonomy for correspondents in the field."

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, working with Andrew Tyndall, reviewed 240 hours of programming and found that only 11 percent of that time and 8 percent of stories consisted of written and edited packages. Sixty-two percent of the cable time consisted of "live" pieces, primarily anchors conducting interviews, and close to 10 percent of the time consisted of Q and A with in-house analysts, experts, and staff.

Along with the "limited breadth of the cable news agenda," the report points to "the limited amount of updating .... Each days' news agenda was narrowly defined, determined in the morning and largely just replicated thereafter." Nearly three-quarters of the stories are "the same matter turned to repeatedly." A viewer watching CNN, MSNBC, or Fox for an entire 16 hours in the course of a recent day might expect to see about one minute on environment, but more than an hour on crime news, an hour on accidents and disasters, 53 minutes on lifestyle coverage, 41 minutes on celebrities and entertainment, an hour and one-half on politics, and two hours and 17 minutes on the Iraq war.