Overview

Was journalism, or at least that of network television, changed by the events of September 11th?

Despite the war on terrorism and conflict in the Middle East, the news Americans see on network television has softened considerably since last fall, to the point that it now looks more like it did before the terrorist attacks than immediately after, according to a new study.

Celebrity and lifestyle coverage, which last fall had all but vanished from evening news and was subordinated even in morning news, has returned to levels close to those of last summer, according to the study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Traditional hard news, meanwhile, has shrunk, reestablishing a trend toward the softening of network news evident since the late 1970s.

At night, stories about national and international affairs have fallen by 33% since October—to just over half of all stories. Lifestyle coverage, which had disappeared almost entirely, again makes up 18% of the evening newscasts. Evening news in other words, now looks much as it did before September 11th.1

The return to form of morning news is less complete. Lifestyle and celebrity coverage again dominate—up three fold since October. Hard news has fallen by more than half.

Still, viewers now can get a diet of some hard news in the mornings, something that was not true last summer, the study found.

The findings seem to refute the idea that television journalism was somehow scared straight or fundamentally changed by the attack on America and the war on terrorism.

Rather, the data suggest that traditional broadcast networks have established levels—perhaps a formula—of how much hard news a show will broadcast and stray from that temporarily only when major news is breaking. Research from media analyst Andrew Tyndall suggests this generally happens in just 5-10% of the network evening broadcasts each year.

Whether this either-or mentality reflects the tastes of American citizens, the cost of covering hard news, or simply the habits and tendencies of news executives, is more difficult to discern.

This is the third report of war coverage by the Project, which is affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The study examined story counts, rather than minutes, for the first 13 weeks of weekday network news programming from January 1, 2002, through April 5. It was executed and coded by the Project in collaboration with media researcher Andrew Tyndall.

The earlier studies indicated that the war did engender a colossal shift in emphasis in network news.

For a time last fall television journalism took on a seriousness even beyond that of the 1970s. Eight in ten evening news stories concerned government, national or international affairs, up 76% from a few months earlier. On morning shows, coverage of such matters was up seven fold.

The findings defied historic trends, which had seen the quotient of such hard news on television steadily drop across three decades. An earlier study by the Project had found that traditional hard news about government, the military, national and international affairs had fallen from close to 70% of the nightly news in 1977, to about 60% in 1987, down to 40% in 1997.²

Separate research addressing the same issue by Andrew Tyndall also indicates that the ratio of hard news to features has shrunk. Since 1988, as the networks have sold more advertising and shrunk their newshole, the time spent on features has remained steady and the lost minutes have been subtracted from hard news instead.

The reversal of this trend after the attack led many observers to speculate that the country and news media were both entering a new phase.

One reason for the speculation was that the sudden change in the news agenda last fall was coupled with changes in attitudes towards journalists. Public opinion polls showed that Americans thought favorably of the more serious coverage. Even more significant, pollsters found the first upturn in approval of journalists’ morality, intentions and impact on society in 15 years.³

As people thought better of journalists and their coverage, more people started watching TV news, reading newspapers and using news websites, again in contrast with long-term trends.

Between late September and mid November last fall, all three evening newscasts enjoyed sizable increases in viewership over the year before, in contrast with long-term declines. Morning news shows were seeing a smaller but still real increase.⁴

This year, the number of total viewers is still up in the first quarter over the year before, though not as much as last fall. According to figures from Nielsen Media Research, ABC World News Tonight is up 6%, NBC Nightly News up 2% and CBS Evening News up 1%.

The morning shows, which saw more subtle increases last fall, have actually done a better job of holding on to some of that audience. ABC’s Good Morning America, which was up 8% last fall in total viewership, is now up 11% compared to the same period last year while NBC Today Show is up 5%. Total viewership for the CBS Early Show, however, has fallen by 1%.

¹ Due to a coding error, the evening news percentages for 2002 have been recalculated to match earlier studies. Some percentages changed slightly. The percentage of so-called hard news, for instance, rose by 2.2 percentage points. The percentage of celebrity news rose by .1 percentage points. The percentage of lifestyle coverage dropped by .8 percentage points. The largest change was in crime coverage, which rose by 3.4 percentage points. The new percentages, reflected throughout, do not change any of the conclusions of the study.

² Changing Definitions of News: A Look at the Mainstream Press Over 20 Years, Project for Excellence in Journalism, March 6, 1998.

³ “Terror Coverage Boosts News Media’s Image,” The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, November 28, 2001.

⁴ In evening news, during the four-week period between September 24 and November 11 of last year, ABC was up 15% over the same period a year earlier, CBS up 9% and NBC up 7%, according to Nielsen Media Research. In the morning, in the four-week period following September 11, the biggest winner was ABC’s Good Morning America, up 8% in total viewers.

The new findings do not mean the evening news programs are identical to before September 11th.

While the amount of hard news contained in the programs is similar, the makeup of that hard news has shifted.

Coverage of the military and foreign affairs, for instance, has supplanted many domestic issues. Military stories are up three-fold since last summer, to 16% of all stories. Coverage of domestic issues, such as concerns of an energy crisis or the HMO bill of rights, is down from 18% of stories in June to 12% this year.

And if homeland security stories are removed, coverage of domestic affairs this year drops further, to just 7% of the nightly news.

The number of homeland security stories on the evening news (5%) may strike some people as surprisingly low. And the bulk of these stories came in January, suggesting that on the network news at least, that topic was considered somewhat played out by early this year.

This decline in domestic affairs coverage, including the low level of homeland security stories, seems significant. It suggests that in the face of major news events, the networks are less inclined to shift from feature coverage than they are to stop covering certain areas of hard news—exchanging one area of hard news for another.

It is “like an on-off switch,” according to Tyndall. “Ultra heavy news days are maximum hard news. All other days (even marginally heavy news days) are half-&-half.”

“What was remarkable about the September 11th crisis (and before that the Florida recount, the Lewinsky impeachment and the Gulf War, for example),” he adds, “was the protracted sequence of successive days on which that rule was violated.”

Traditionally religion and business don’t rise to front-page coverage and are considered something in between hard news and feature stories. Religion stories are often more about spirituality and morality, and business more about your money or Wall Street interests. This year, however, saw two significant news events that fell under these topics: the sex scandals in the Catholic Church and the collapse of Enron.

Adding all of these stories to the traditional hard news, many of which were feature side stories rather than straight news accounts, would bring that category to 63%.

Still, roughly one in five stories was a traditional lifestyle feature such as male nannies gaining acceptance as caregivers on NBC, the fattest cities in America on ABC or predictions for next winter’s El Nino on CBS.

Why is this?

One possible explanation is that this is audience-driven—that Americans will watch only a certain amount of serious news before they need the program leavened by something else. Audience demand is usually hard to pin down in television. The fact is audiences have shriveled as network news has gotten softer over the years. And the last six months have seen an upturn in audience as the broadcasts, at least initially, carried a greater percentage of hard news.

There are other explanations to consider as well.

The first is that the dramatic and sustained cutbacks in resources and staffing at the networks have made it enormously difficult for network television journalism to cover world events, especially over any sustained period of time. The networks, in effect, were staffed for a pre-September 11th world and basically remain so.

When it comes to foreign coverage, for instance, Tyndall’s numbers show that “the consequence of mid-90’s cutbacks in foreign coverage has never been that major overseas stories suffer.” Often, however, the networks jump from crisis to crisis, parachuting in reporters, producers and photographers. What gets cut, Tyndall finds, are the medium-sized, more sustained stories like the financial collapse of Argentina this year.

The second factor is that even if the networks’ staffs could be stretched, the cost of doing so—or adding the staff to do so—is no longer considered acceptable.

Instead, the nightly network newscasts have redefined news as breaking or feature. With this definition, they are capable of doing a superb job of covering hard news that is fast-breaking—temporarily throwing their limited resources all in one direction.

But as these breaking stories slow down, whether they are the war on terrorism, the implications of Enron or the crisis in the Catholic Church, the networks return to more familiar formulae, even if the stories themselves remain unresolved.

Sustained coverage of the incremental has largely been lost. It is the kind of journalism that advances stories perhaps more slowly through what used to be a normal practice—beat reporting. Assigning a journalist to cover a particular topic, region or issue day-in and day-out was for the most part lost as budgets shrank. Yet this may be precisely the kind of journalism that builds an informed audience over time. Because of the reach of network news, even now, the absence of this kind of sustained coverage influences the news agenda of all other journalism.

The third explanation is that the executives, after over 20 years of lightening the diet of network news, have come to program their newscasts a certain way. They have developed certain assumptions, beats and sources, and have shed themselves of hard news reporters in favor of feature reporters who can service their magazine programs. Again, Tyndall finds this formula of half-hard half-softer in roughly 90%-to-95% of evening broadcasts each year.

Some combination of all these factors is probably at play. But they suggest the idea that network television news can substantially change is far more complicated, and unlikely, than some observers had hoped last fall.

In foreign news, for example, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the bulk of it coming since March 15, accounted for more than half (58%) of all the foreign affairs coverage on the nightly news this year. The kidnapping and subsequent death of reporter Daniel Pearl comprised another 7%, a sign of TV journalism’s capacity to be captivated by stories focused around one individual.

All other foreign stories paled. Afghanistan, for instance, made up just 4% of all foreign coverage. President Bush’s trip to Asia and various stories involving Iraq each made up 3%. Tensions between India and Pakistan and the Yemen terror crackdown came next, each accounting for 2%.

Why the big jump in serious news again in March with the Israeli-Palestinian flareup, after months of getting softer? The news itself doesn’t fully explain it. Al Quaeda and Taliban troops remain in Afghanistan to this day. The heaviest fighting with American and allied troops, indeed, occurred in 2002, with the battle during operation Anaconda in March. The second heaviest fighting may be occurring now, with operation Condor. The stories of the search for Osama Bin Laden and the struggle for stable democracy in Afghanistan could easily have become major stories.

One reason may be that Israel remains a place where the networks, even with their cutbacks in resources, still maintain bureaus.

Other topics that can be treated as either serious or soft news shifted between this year and last. Crime coverage, which some researchers argue has been rising in recent years, dropped to almost nothing (4% of stories) last Fall. It is back up to 12%, the same as last summer.

While morning news has softened, it does not strictly resemble its image from last summer.

What were largely lifestyle and celebrity programs last June—and became serious sources of information of overnight events last fall—have now become something of a hybrid. Americans can now see some level of serious news each morning on the networks.

Roughly a quarter of what appears on morning news shows could be categorized as traditional hard news about national and international affairs. That is triple the amount last June, when fewer than one in ten stories (7%) fit that description.

On the other hand, it is still significantly less than the nearly six-in-ten stories (58%) that hard news comprised of morning news in our sample period in October.

And make no mistake, these morning shows are still dominated by stories about gardening, recipes, celebrity chatter and product promotion. The lifestyle and celebrity fare this year has made up roughly three-fifths (58%) of all morning stories, after dropping to just 24% last fall. That, however, is somewhat lower than last summer, when celebrity and lifestyle stories made up nearly 75% of the morning shows.

Indeed, most of the increase in hard news comes at the expense of lifestyle feature stories. Those stories are down 9 percentage points since June (38% now versus 47% in June).

The quotient of interviews with stars of the latest movies and news of celebrity weddings has declined only slightly, from 25% of the stories in June to 23% this year.

If someone were turning to morning programs for news of the day about a subject such as a bombing in the Middle East, one would also find the style of reporting could shift from day to day or hour to hour.

[features]

At times, the coverage consists of live, on-scene reports of the sort seen from Ground Zero following the attacks and Pakistan in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. The Today Show, for exampled, featured Tom Brokaw reporting live from Tel Aviv about a bombing that took place overnight. Or there might be interviews with some of the principal newsmakers such as The Early Show’s interview with the mayor of Netanya where one of the bombings occurred.

Those harder stories, though, are scattered amid a largely human-interest approach to the news. At one point, a morning show might give a detailed news report. Another time, this same news might come in quick anchor reads to make room for any number of a features: Good Morning America’s piece about how children of a war zone live a normal life, an interview on The Early Show with a man who had near misses at both the World Trade Center and the bombing in Jaffe, or correspondent Martin Fletcher’s reflection for the Today Show on what it is like to live in the Middle East.

Were it not for the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the story of network television this year would be an even clearer trend toward its pre-September appearance.

In January, less than half of the evening news, and less than a quarter of the morning shows, could be considered traditional hard news.

By February, during the Olympics and a lull in war activities, that number had fallen further to 44% on the evening news. That is lower than the summer of 2001, when Gary Condit dominated the news and some critics were bemoaning that journalism had fallen to a new modern low of sensationalism and questionable priorities. Lifestyle coverage, especially involving the Olympics, surged to over a quarter of all evening news stories.

Mornings in February had become even more focused away from the war. Hard news had fallen to 15% of stories. Lifestyle pieces now made up more than half (55%) and celebrity coverage another 15%. It was a thorough return to the pre September 11th summer formula.

The decline in serious news continued into March, well after the Olympics had ended. But when the Middle East conflict erupted in the middle of that month, there was a notable shift back to seriousness.

On the evening news, there was a 20-percentage point increase in hard news over February, and a 13-percentage point decline in lifestyle coverage.

In the mornings, there was a nine-percentage point increase in hard news, and a drop of 27 percentage points in lifestyle stories.

  That hard news focus continued into April. In the first week of the month, hard news, primarily that of the Middle East conflict, accounted for nearly eight in ten evening news stories. Foreign affairs made up fully 62% of the stories on the evening news.

In the mornings, 41% of stories were hard news. Lifestyle and celebrity made up half the stories.

The Enron scandal also stood out, particularly in the evening news. Though, perhaps to the surprise of many, it did not dominate, accounting for just 9% of the stories on the nightly news in the first 13 weeks of the year. Mostly—by a factor of about three-to-one—it was covered as strictly a business story. Only 34 stories in all focused on the regulatory or political aspects of the Enron case. And in all only two stories focused on Enron as a crime. Most of the Enron coverage, too, was concentrated in January.

In the mornings, Enron was a story, but not a huge one, accounting for less than 3% of all stories. Interestingly, morning news was twice as likely to push the political or regulatory focus of the Enron story as the nightly news was.

By comparison, the Andrea Yates case about the Houston woman who drowned her children was actually a bigger story on morning television than Enron.

The child molestation scandal in the Catholic Church was also a notable story on television, though smaller than Enron. It made up 2% of all stories in the evening news, and 1% of stories in the mornings.

In morning news, indeed, the scandal in the church was only as big a story as Valentines Day, and was outstripped by the trial of the Hockey Dad, the San Francisco dog mauling, and Andrea Yates.

Looking at the three networks separately, the most significant finding is that the aftermath of September 11 may have brought them all a little closer together. Many of the differences evident in June and even in October have lessened or vanished together.

Among the evening programs, CBS led in June as the network most committed to hard news (53% compared with 44% at ABC and 39% at NBC) and remained that way in October. So far in 2002, CBS’ hard news quotient has risen slightly to 56% while ABC and NBC have seen more substantial increases to 53% and 52% respectively. The change has left the three networks closer to each other than they were last summer.

CBS, which carried very little coverage of the Olympics, compared with ABC and NBC, does stand out for doing fewer lifestyle feature stories. ABC and NBC are more in line with each other.

Among the three morning news programs, the measurable differences apparent in both June and October of last year have largely vanished as well. The hard news levels are now within two percent of each other, and celebrity and lifestyle stories both fall on a small uphill curve across network with ABC at the bottom and NBC at the top.

Overall, about three-in-ten stories on the nightly news (31%) were about America’s war on terrorism, whether those were stories about activities oversees, feature stories about how people were coping, a celebrity benefit concert, the possible impact on the stock market, or news about Presidential action. In mornings, it was half that, 14%.

In both the evenings and mornings, NBC was slightly less likely to air these stories than either of the other two networks.

What kinds of war stories did television carry? The vast majority in both the evening and morning was a part of the program’s hard news.

In evening news, nearly half of the stories were military pieces, about, for example, casualties and military conditions in the Battle of Gardez. Just over one in five concerned domestic affairs, such as airport security and another 17% were foreign affair stories such as the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl or the terror crackdown in Yemen.

A smaller percentage of the war stories related to crime and legal prosecutions such as the charge of treason against John Walker Lindh, the California Muslim who fought with the Taliban and the Zacarias Moussaoui trial.

Among the morning shows, hard news was still by far the most common source for war stories (87%), but the breakdown is a little different. Morning news was less likely to run stories about the military (30%) or foreign affairs (15%) and more likely to cover domestic issues relating to the war (40%).

In addition, the morning shows did manage to inject in a handful of entertainment stories related to the war. Pieces such as how the World Trade Center disaster inspired comic book writers, PBS’s intention to have Sesame Street address the attacks and charity concerts accounted for 2% of their war stories.