TV News Pounded in PEJ Study/Local TV News Covers Health a Lot, But Not Always Well

TV NEWS GETS POUNDED IN PEJ STUDY
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
"At many old-media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over. The idealists have lost." That is one of the sobering conclusions of the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual report, The State of the News Media 2006. The study looked at a range of media, including network, local station, and cable news, and found much wanting. Of, cable, the report generalized: "It is thinly reported, suffers from a focus on the immediate, especially during the day, is prone to opinion mongering and is easily controlled by sources who want to filibuster." As for network news: "the underlying problems...continue without apparent interruption," the study says. Viewership continued to decline, the nightly newscasts "skew old" while advertisers are going the other direction. While the talk in the industry was about the absence of the three long-time anchors, the study suggested that one of the more significant hires was billionaire Larry Kramer taking over CBS digital. "Five years from now, we may look back and think the most important changes of the year in network news were about other things," the study suggests. "Did the three news divisions really begin to innovate television news on the Internet? Did they start to see broadcasting as no longer their core delivery platform for news? To what extent did they start to see their TV channels as a way to drive traffic to the next generation of television news, online?" In the local TV news race, the study found declining early evening news ratings, and possible trouble brewing in early morning, the explosive growth area for local news in the past few years. The upside is that late local news "may be improving its audience appeal." Pointing out that the local TV business is still a license to print money -- 40% or 50% profit margins in many cases--the study warned that there was a risk to continuing to demand "such huge profit margins and year-to-year growth in earnings when the audience is stagnant," particularly if the casualty is investment in the product even as the competition heats up. The study found that " roughly half of all the news hole on local TV news that was not given over to weather, traffic and sports was devoted to crime and accidents. Stories about local institutions, government, infrastructure, education and more were generally relegated to brief anchor reads in the middle of the newscast," and war news got less time than lifestyle stories.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6315346?display=Breaking+News...
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In a related story...
* Local TV News Covers Health a Lot, But Not Always Well
Local television newscasts, where most Americans get most of their news, are packed with medical stories and health information. But the first-ever national study of that coverage finds many problems with it, and sees room for improvement by both TV stations and the health experts whose work fills the news. In the March issue of the American Journal of Managed Care, researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report results from an in-depth analysis of health coverage on local TV newscasts from across the country. In all, health and medical stories comprised 11 percent of the news portion of late-evening newscasts in the one-month period studied, with 1,799 such stories carried on 2,795 broadcasts captured from the representative sample of 122 stations in the nation's top 50 media markets. The average story was 33 seconds long, and most did not give specifics about the source of the information presented. Items about specific diseases tended not to contain recommendations for viewers, or information about how common the disease was -- which could help put the news into perspective with other health issues. But most disturbing, the study's authors say, were the egregious errors contained in a small minority of studies -- errors that could have led to serious consequences.
http://media.prnewswire.com/en/jsp/main.jsp?resourceid=3160886