Paper. Printed On. Being Not Worth It.

You are going to see stories floating around about this (so-called) survey: An Annual Report on American Journalism. I'll print an exerpt of their methodology and you tell me if it looks like a good way of doing things.

To assess the nature of the 24-hour news cycle as presented on cable news programming, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were selected because they were the three most-viewed cable news channels in 2003.


For the twenty-day sample, we selected three program types to study at each network: Daytime programming, the closest thing to a traditional newscast, and the highest-rated prime time talk show. The following programs were captured and analyzed:


DAYTIME PROGRAMMING

The 11-to-12 o'clock hour for each network


NEWSCAST/NEWS DIGEST PROGRAMS

CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown

FOX's Special Report with Brit Hume

MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann


PRIME-TIME TALK PROGRAMS

CNN's Larry King Live

FOX's O'Reilly Factor

MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews

How many of these strike people as straight news programs? My answer is almost none. Maybe the CNN and MSNBC 11-12 shows, certainly not that awful "Dayside" program on Fox.

To top it off these are some of the results they get.

In the degree to which journalists are allowed to offer their own opinions, Fox stands out. Across the programs studied, nearly seven out of ten stories (68%) included personal opinions from Fox's reporters -- the highest of any outlet studied by far.

Just 4% of CNN segments included journalistic opinion, and 27% on MSNBC.

Let me see if I've got this right: This study's assesment of CNN news is 2/3 made up on Aaron Brown's Newsnight and Larry King Live and they could only find 4% of the segments that included journalistic opinion? I watch Newsnight all the time and if you cannot find Aaron Brown's opinions all over it you are not looking.

Besides is comparing Larry King's program with O'Reilly's really fair? Larry will spend whole shows talking to teachers who sleep with their students or with actors or other non-news type folks. Wouldn't it have made more sense to add Lou Dobbs' program instead?

It looks like, to this observer, that the people who ran this survey found exactly what they set out to find.