Cable news gets slammed by PEIJ

Here's an old post from March that I never put up. But it's still pretty important.

What's it all about? Well, it's true after all: Fox News is opinionated and one-sided! And the other cable news channels aren't much better. That's just one part of the findings of a huge report, called The State of the News Media 2005, by Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report, which was released earlier this year, can be found here. It's an important annual report card for the media. It has lots to say about lots of media, but one of the headlines is about Fox. As Howard Kurtz notes for the Washington Post

In a 617-page report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 73 percent of the stories on Fox News covering the Iraq war last year included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them. By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists' own views. The report 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."

So much for the Iraq War. What about cable news performance more generally?

The [PEIJ] project describes cable news reporting as pretty thin compared with the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts. Only a quarter of the cable stories examined contained two or more identifiable sources, compared with 49 percent of network evening news stories and 81 percent of newspaper front-page stories. This, says the study, is in part because cable leans heavily on live reports, 60 percent of which are based on only a single identifiable source ("the White House said today," etc.). What's more, cable news is far more one-sided than other media outlets, with only a quarter of the stories involving controversy making more than a passing reference to a second point of view. By contrast, says the report, the network morning shows, PBS and newspaper front pages were more than three times as likely to contain a mix of views.