Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Anna Nicole coverage: the postmortem

It wasn't as bad as it seemed!

That's the mildly heartening conclusion of "Anna Nicole Smith--Anatomy of a Feeding Frenzy," a new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Here's a fuller explanation:

The Smith saga did not attract major coverage from all the media sectors studied, which includes 48 different outlets across five media sectors.... Instead, it was driven largely by relentless attention from two—both television-based. One was network morning news. The other, even bigger, was cable TV news, where this story accounted for nearly a quarter of all the airtime....
These findings add to the evidence of cable’s fixation on one big event. But they also go beyond that. The fact that for the most part, the newspapers, web sites, nightly network newscasts, and radio news outlets treated Smith’s death as a blip on the radar screen speaks to cable’s ability to magnify an event until it feels like the only story on the entire media agenda.

Still more proof that cable fries the brain. The full report is available here.

4/4/2007 2:34:46 PM by Adam Reilly | Comments [1] |

Wednesday, April 04, 2007 6:35:37 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

The cable news nets closely track the numbers -- not only for each show, but exactly when viewers tune in and tune out. I heard Keith Olbermann (not on "Countdown" at the time) say that the numbers spiked whenever Anna Nicole coverage came on, and that he was basically doing what he could to limit the Anna Nicole coverage in his own show to one segment per day.

Hey, the real news is depressing and stuff. The Anna Nicole story pushes a lot of emotional buttons, but at the end of the day, it has no impact at all on anybody else's life. So we can experience a range of feelings without worrying about death, war, taxes, or Constitutional rights.

jvwalt

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