Two recent studies, one American and one British, indict TV news for its growing emphasis on live, unscripted reporting. Fast-breaking, popular, with a contemporary air of informality, such reporting is also measurably thinner, more opinionated, and less densely sourced than other news forms. Typically consisting of anchors (or “presenters” in British parlance) interviewing or chatting with reporters in the field or with experts, these live two-way reports now make up about half the coverage available on U.S. cable news, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ). PEJ, now part of the Pew Research Center (which describes itself as a non-partisan “fact tank”) was earlier affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

PEJ’s 2005 and 2006 “State of the News Media” reports (available at www.journalism.org), find that cable TV news has “all but abandoned what was once the primary element of television news, the written and edited story.” In its place is “a journalism of assertion” where reporters perform “off the cuff or from hasty notes” and where “information is disseminated with only minimal attempts to check it out.”

The PEJ studies are based on a review of media content in print, TV, radio, magazines, and major online sites. For cable, their approach is layered. For 2005’s report, this meant analyzing CNN, Fox, and MSNBC primetime talk, daytime and evening news on twenty randomly selected days. For 2006, they tightened the net with a close analysis of four hours of news on each of the three stations on a single day, May 11, 2005.

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