Which Topics Get Top Billing?
Which Are Downplayed?
To ensure fairness to broadcasters, we developed another measure, called the “civic contribution” index. To get credit here, only a quarter of the story’s time or space need deal with the actions of those who run the nation, state, counties, and cities, those in charge of our schools, prisons, courts, police, parks, water and sewer systems, highways, buses and subways, those charged with keeping our air and water clean, our buildings safe, our food wholesome, etc. This index allows a paper or station to focus on how these actors affect people, rather than on the give and take of “talking heads”--official sources.
Under this more relaxed standard, there is still a dividing line between the three newspapers and Channel 2, on one hand, and Channels 4, 5 and 7, on the other. However, the civic contribution index shows that these three stations pay at least minimal attention to such fundamentally important topics.
Why the discrepancy in news selection? From a journalistic--that is to say public service--viewpoint, news about what our government is doing and news about those who would lead us and propositions that could change how we treat juvenile offenders, taxes, schools and public parks, clearly affect more of us more deeply than stories about a shooting here and a fire there, or even an airliner crash in Taiwan.
But from an economic standpoint, the visual images of a burning airplane, the grief of a mother who has just lost a child to violence, the strangeness of a dog plucked from a car and thrown into traffic by an enraged motorist--these stories attract not just people who want to be informed, but those who want to rubber-neck tragedy. They are thought to enlarge audience--which determines how much advertisers will pay--and thus profits.
In contrast, government and political stories are often visually boring. They are frequently abstract--about ideas, rather than events. They are bloodless. In addition, they may not be important for everyone across the region. What San Jose’s city council decides rarely affects Walnut Creek residents.
These characteristics present two problems for television. First, unlike newspapers, TV can’t zone its broadcast--one newscast for the South Bay, another for the City, another for the East or North Bay. Every viewer gets the same story. Second, unlike newspapers readers, television viewers can’t readily bypass unwanted stories to get to those they most want to see. The viewer has to wait for such stories to pass, or penalize the station by clicking to a competitor.
Neither of these technological features block television from doing strong government and political reporting, however. In fact, Channel 2 watches what government does or ought to be doing about as well as any newspaper except the Chronicle. TV reporters can choose issues that affect more than one city or county. How one community is wrestling with transportation gridlock, or lack of affordable housing, or urban sprawl, etc., is likely to be newsworthy across the Bay Area. These are common problems. In addition, reporters can focus on government bodies and political questions that affect us all at the state (or even federal) level. Sacramento isn’t a long drive. (Facing the same dilemma, National Public Radio uses both of these strategies brilliantly.)
Some stories are prominently displayed not for their news value but because editors think they will attract readers or viewers who use news more for entertainment than orientation to reality. If such stories expose more people to serious news and enlarge the resources of the newsroom, they serve the ends of journalism. But at three stations--Channels 5, 7 and 4--purely human interest, or celebrity news or sports take up large chunks of prime news time, displacing more informative fare.
Percent of prime news time or space devoted to celebrity, sports, human interest
To be fair, Channel 5 is in a slightly disadvantaged position because it’s the only newscast running just 30 minutes. While other stations can put sports in the second half of the newscast and avoid being counted in this analysis, Channel 5 cannot. There is no journalistic reason, however, why KPIX must run twice as much sports news as government and politics combined.
If you are interested in news for its entertainment value, Channels 5 and 7 are hands down winners. They are consistently full of fluff and mayhem; serious news is scarce. Pete Wilson’s furrowed brow not withstanding, Channel 4 provides only a marginally more serious newscast. If you expect news about matters that matter, Channel 2 is your only choice among the Bay Area’s big four.
The area’s three leading newspapers mix entertainment with news you need to know. But even the most informational of these, the Chronicle, significantly lags a paper of national stature such as the Washington Post. The Post, of course, is located in a metro area where the principal industries are government and politics. But it’s also a region with as many crashes and fires, much more crime, and just as much fluff as the Bay Area.
We analyzed only the front page and local front pages including all continuations inside the paper, as well as related inside stories (“sidebars”) for newspapers. For TV, we took the first 30 minutes of the premier evening newscast. Thus a much smaller proportion of the day’s reporting in print is taken into account than in broadcasting. In almost all cases we analyzed stations and papers during the same news cycle--evening newscasts and next day’s paper. The sample was designed to balance the number of editions from each day of the week.
Agreement between the two journalists--one each from print and broadcast--who categorized these stories was 66 percent after correcting for agreements due to chance (Scott’s Pi). The margin of error due to the chance that our sample may have consistently caught stations or newspapers on atypical news days varies with the analysis. The largest margin of error is in the “ambulance index” and is approximately +/- 4.5 percentage points. (That’s at the 95 percent confidence level, meaning there’s a 1 in 20 chance that the error is greater than 4.5 points.) The error margins for the other analyses are smaller.
If you’d care to see the definitions we used to separate news into these categories,
click the apple.
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--John McManus
