In the college cult classic “PCU,” Droz, the wise fifth-year senior played by Jeremy Piven, is showing a visiting high school senior, Tom, around his fraternity when they stumble upon a stoned, unshaven student named Pigman who appears to have not moved for days. The following dialogue ensues:
Tom: What’s he doing?
Droz: He’s finishing his senior thesis. Pigman is trying to prove the Caine-Hackman theory. No matter what time it is, 24 hours a day, you can find a Michael Caine or Gene Hackman movie playing on TV.
Tom: That’s his thesis?
Droz: Yes! That’s the beauty of college these days, Tommy! You can major in Game Boy if you know how to bullshit.
Re-watching this scene over the weekend gave us an idea. Why not try to prove an updated version of that theory — namely, the Jackson-Holloway Theory? Our hypothesis: If one were to check in on news channels MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News once an hour, for 16 hours, starting from 6:08 am on Tuesday, June 21, to 10 pm or so that night, one or another of Cable’s Big Three would be covering Natalee Holloway’s disappearance or Michael Jackson’s recent acquittal every time we checked in.
George Will once wrote, “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.”
In this case, neither occurred. Using the methodology described above, we could not prove the Jackson-Holloway theory. It turned out that if you randomly turned on cable news and watched for a minute once an hour or so for 16 hours, you were not guaranteed the latest report on Holloway or Jackson. However, we weren’t “pleasantly surprised” either. The obsession with trivia wasn’t constant, but it was close enough. If we add the day’s other non-stories — Missing Utah Boy, Saddam Hussen’s prison guards talk to a magazine reporter, the dust-up over Sen. Durbin’s GITMO remarks, and a few others — then we, like Pigman, still have a sound thesis to present.
Here’s our tally of the non-stories of the day, as designated by us, and the mentions of same, channel by channel:
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And here’s a chart listing the actual news stories of the day and the mentions by each channel:
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As you can see, mentions of the missing white girl in Aruba, Natalee Holloway, and the missing white boy in Utah, Brennan Hawkins, got more airtime — by three to two — than any combination of the Edgar Ray Killen verdict, the Bolton confirmation, or Bush’s visit with the Prime Minister of Vietnam.
The ongoing carnage in Iraq received only one update, compared with three for the news that Saddam Hussein’s prison guards had told not much of anything surprising to a fashion magazine.
Some other highlights:
— Fox News was the place for anything Natalee Holloway- or Sen. Dick Durbin-related. Those two subjects received 10 times more coverage than the top news stories of the day.
(In fact, Fox News gets the credit for the static over Sen. Dick Durbin’s GITMO comments being assigned to our non-news section. With its bias toward keeping conflict alive, the network allowed its endless coverage of a “story” that didn’t move at all during the day to degenerate into hackery. Had it been done differently, it might have qualified as news.)
— At one point early in the morning, CNN led with various headlines, then put up a graphic labeled “Other Headlines.” The first of two “other” stories: a report that former VP Walter Mondale’s daughter had been diagnosed with brain cancer. The second (and this is verbatim): “British farmers want ‘couch potato’ out of dictionary; they say it has a negative impact.”
Other tidbits:
— “Fox and Friends” had a segment called “Ask Ollie!” where viewers could call in and ask Oliver North questions.
— MSNBC felt its interview with Michael Jackson’s mom was so special it they slapped an “exclusive” banner on it. She told them that the long trial was draining for her son, both physically and mentally.
— Fox News was really, really excited when Greta Van Susteren got inside the house of teenage suspect Joran Van Der Sloot, with Natalee Holloway’s mom in tow.
— CNN’s Anderson Cooper actually had the chutzpah to promise viewers an angle on the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise story that they wouldn’t see elsewhere.
— In a 60-to-120-second snapshot it’s difficult to understand what Tucker Carlson is talking about. He’s right, though — his show is changing the pace of news.
Editor’s note on the methodology: Using TVeyes — a search tool that provides video and close-captioned transcripts of television programs — CJR Daily checked in on the three cable news networks once an hour for 16 hours. The times checked: 6:08 am, 7:16, 8:24, 9:32, 10:40, 11:48, 12:56, 1:04 pm, 2:12, 3:20, 4:28, 5:36, 6:44, 7:52, 8:00, 9:08, 10:16. We watched between 45 and 120 seconds at each stop. If a station was in commercial, we waited until it returned and began watching from there. If a program was promoting what was coming up next, then we did not count that as coverage. There are stories in both categories that were not charted. For instance, MSNBC covered the difficulties of putting child molesters behind bars — a real news story. At the other end of the spectrum, CNN covered a sculpture at CIA Headquarters that seems to be sending a message to DaVinci Code fanatics.
Correction: The above post has been changed to reflect that Brennan Hawkins went missing in Utah, not Idaho.
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.