U.S. Media Offers Little Diversity

International Herald Tribune – March 14, 2006

Katharine Q. Seelye – N.Y. Times

 

 

A third annual review of the state of U.S. journalism has found that while there are more media outlets than ever, they are covering less news.

 

As part of the review, a special study looked at how a variety of outlets, including newspapers, television, radio and the Internet, covered a single day's news and concluded that there was enormous repetition and amplification of just two dozen stories.

 

Moreover, it said, "the incremental and even ephemeral nature of what the media define as news is striking."

 

On May 11, 2005, a date that was chosen randomly, the study said, the U.S. Congress was debating the appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, the actor Macaulay Culkin was testifying in the singer Michael Jackson's molestation trial in California, and car bombs in Iraq killed 79 people.

 

On that day, the study said, "Google News offers access within two clicks to 14,000 stories, but really they are accounts of just 24 news events."

 

It said print media and the evening network news, for example, focused on the violence in Iraq, a false alarm in Washington involving a small plane that had violated restricted airspace and protests in Afghanistan.

 

Cable television and the morning national news programs, the study said, highlighted the Jackson trial and a murder in Illinois, while local television and radio produced a steady diet of weather, traffic and local crime.

 

The blogosphere, meanwhile, shrugged off most of the breaking news, focusing largely on what were perceived as broader, longer-term issues.

 

"Contrary to the charge that the blogosphere is purely parasitic," the study said, bloggers raised new issues. But they did almost no original reporting.

 

Cable news was the "shallowest" and most "ephemeral" of the media, the study said. Newspapers, which are the biggest news-gathering organizations, covered the most topics, provided the most extensive sourcing and provided the most angles on particular events, it said, "though perhaps in language and sourcing tilted toward elites."

 

Many of the national broadcast reports quoted the same few people.

 

"More coverage, in other words, does not always mean greater diversity of voices," the study said. "Consuming the news continuously does not mean being better informed."

 

The review was conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an institute affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

 

The coverage offered by 57 media outlets was examined in depth in three cities - Houston, Milwaukee and Bend, Oregon, which the study said had been randomly chosen from lists of cities of differing sizes and locations that had certain characteristics in common.