In a week dominated by two mega-stories—the continuing
travails of Obamacare and the devastating typhoon in the Philippines—America’s
hypercompetitive cable news outlets exercised very different news judgments,
according to Pew Research Center.
The health insurance saga took a dramatic turn when
President Obama announced a change in the law to prevent individuals from
having coverage cancelled. And frantic relief efforts continued in the Philippines ,
where the official death toll from Typhoon Haiyan reached the 4,000 mark as of
Wednesday.
A clear pattern in how four major cable news networks
handled the competing stories emerged from a Pew Research Center analysis of 80
hours of programming from Nov. 11-15. The analysis studied one hour of midday
and three hours of prime-time each day.
The two channels with strong ideological identities in
prime-time—liberal MSBNC and conservative Fox News—spent far more time on the
politically-charged health insurance story than the overseas disaster.
The differences in the amount of coverage of each story on
Fox News and MSNBC were striking. In the sample studied, MSNBC devoted three
hours and eight minutes to the issues surrounding Obamacare, about four times
as much as the Philippines
typhoon garnered (41 minutes). On Fox, the differences were even greater. In
the sample studied, the channel devoted almost eight hours to the health care
drama and six minutes to the aftermath of the typhoon. That translates into
nearly 80 times more coverage of the health insurance story than the typhoon.
CNN had the closest balance between the two stories,
spending slightly more than three-and-a-half hours on Obamacare and just under
five hours on the typhoon. The fledgling Al Jazeera America network devoted three hours
and 10 minutes to the typhoon, more than twice as much airtime as health
insurance commanded (one-and-a-half hours).
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