Cable's Clout: Does cable news' obsessive single-topic focus set the agenda for campaign coverage?

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American Journalism Review: From AJR, June/July 2008
Cable's Clout
With their obsessive single-topic focus, are the three 24-hour cable news channels setting the agenda for the rest of the media when it comes to the presidential campaign—even though most of the material they endlessly flog originates somewhere else?

By Paul Farhi

....The (Reverend Jeremiah Wright) episode was a perfect illustration of what might be called "the cable news effect." In recent years, and particularly during the current presidential campaign, stories become much bigger deals as a result of the repetition and prominence given to them by cable's big three: CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. The cable networks rarely break news themselves – they tend to rely on newspapers and Web sites for that – but few campaign stories have much impact or become an important part of the campaign narrative until they get heavy play on cable.

Cable, in other words, creates its own news wave, generating news simply by placing other sources' reporting on the agenda....

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As CNN discovered during the first Persian Gulf War and later with the O.J. Simpson saga, all-news channels maximize and sustain their relatively small audiences not by covering many subjects throughout the day, but by focusing intently on one story. In the 23 days between reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith's death and her burial in early 2007, the story dominated cable and morning broadcast TV newscasts. But other media sources gave it only passing mention. As the Project for Excellence in Journalism noted in its study of the coverage, "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 mere 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."

For much of the past year, and certainly since January, cable's obsessive focus has been the presidential campaign. About two-thirds of cable news airtime this year has been devoted to campaign stories, a far higher fraction than any other news medium's, according to the PEJ. "Cable is hungrily searching" for a story it can hammer throughout a daily news cycle, says Mark Jurkowitz of the PEJ. "The question it asks is, 'What are they fighting about today?' Today it will be (McCain campaign official) Charlie Black. Tomorrow it will be a misstatement by someone else."

That's where cable exerts its biggest influence on the rest of the media – as an engine of reaction and response. Cable's intense and often immediate coverage of the day's big controversy forces candidates to fire back, which then compels the rest of the media to cover the response....

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There's something more prosaic to consider in any discussion of influence: the prominence of television in newsrooms everywhere. Is there a newsroom in America that doesn't have its TVs tuned to a news station throughout the day? At my own newspaper, an oversize flat-screen TV was recently installed in the foyer of our main newsroom, making CNN or MSNBC the first thing visitors and employees encounter when they step off the elevator. Reporters such as (Anne Kornblut of the Washington Post) pooh-pooh the significance of this, saying that TV is just one more news source, no different than having an Internet connection on one's desktop. But there may be more to it than that. "I can't dismiss the idea that there's a kind of osmosis effect," the (New York Times's Mark) Leibovich says. "At our bureau, we have half a dozen political reporters with the TV on all day. Sometimes it's just background noise. But it's human nature to see Jeremiah Wright or Hillary's RFK comment on TV all day and think, 'Maybe this is something we should follow.'"...

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4574