A new 617-page study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism confirms what many people have been saying for a long time: FOX News journalists (if you can call them that) are better at voicing personal opinion than they are at reporting the facts. According to the study, 73 percent of FOX's coverage on the conflict in Iraq was the based on the opinions of the cable news channel's anchors or journalists. At the same time, CNN presented only 2 percent on-air opinion, while MSNBC's reporting accounted for 29 percent opinion.
Washington Post Staff Writer Howard Kurtz notes:
The 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.
In the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), David Westin contends that "There are powerful business reasons for the embrace we're seeing of opinion journalism on TV. It's vivid, it's entertaining, and -- let's face it -- it's less expensive than reporting out a difficult story."
The data collected by the Project for Excellence in Journalism supports earlier research indicating a trend in the political polarization of audiences and significant changes in news viewing habits. Last year, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press study found that "Since 2000, the number of Americans who regularly watch Fox News has increased by nearly half from 17% to 25% while audiences for other cable outlets have been flat at best."
The 2004 report also found that 52 percent of Fox viewers claim to be conservative, which in turn would support the political polarization theory. So why do people watch FOX's partisan news when only 25 percent of those surveyed actually say they believe what they see and hear?
Some of these underlying trends are noted in the most recent Project for Excellence in Journalism report. The study notes five major trends:
- There are now several models of journalism, and the trajectory increasingly is toward those that are faster, looser, and cheaper.
- The rise in partisanship of news consumption and the notion that people have retreated to their ideological corners for news has been widely exaggerated.
- To adapt, journalism may have to move in the direction of making its work more transparent and more expert, and of widening the scope of its searchlight.
- Despite the new demands, there is more evidence than ever that the mainstream media are investing only cautiously in building new audiences.
- The three broadcast network news divisions face their most important moment of transition in decades.
The rise of opinion journalism on TV is a sign of the times in which we live. As Westin suggests, "Opinion offers a quick, efficient, and effective way to attract and audience in a cluttered world. Seeking to report the factual truth of a matter, on the other hand, can be hard work, expensive, and inefficient."