Fox News Channel Trails rivals in Murdoch Coverage

Fox News dominates the ratings in prime-time cable, with popular hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. How have they responded to their own parent company being in the news? The answer is they haven't considered it nearly as much of a story as their rivals.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed the content of four hours of daily prime time and an hour a day of daytime programming. The analysis finds that the Murdoch- owned Fox News Channel devoted about one-fifth as much time to the story as MSNBC and about one-sixth as much time as CNN. The study looked at cable coverage from July 6-8 and from July11-15, a period that began right after reports that the News of the World tabloid had hacked into the phone of a murdered 13-year-old girl and ended with the resignations of two top Murdoch confidants. In that time frame, CNN and MSNBC devoted virtually the same amount of prime-time attention to the story -- 129 minutes and 41 seconds on CNN and 125 minutes and 24 seconds on MSNBC, or roughly 16 minutes per night in prime time. The Fox News Channel, in contrast, devoted 23 minutes and 34 seconds to the subject, or an average of about three minutes per night.