All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Having spent a number of years in the business of counting the amount of time that TV news gives to this story or the other, I always found the “Here’s What Was On” function of the job far less interesting than the “Here’s Who Covered What Differently” angle.

So it was with great interest that I read today’s Project for Excellence in Journalism report that summed up the first quarter of this year’s cable new agenda, breaking down what the three cable networks deemed newsworthy, and to what extent.

It’s not pretty. As much as it’s old hat to raise questions about Fox News Channel’s coverage of political issues, it was still surprising (even to a cynical eye) to see that FNC gave less than half the airtime that MSNBC did to coverage of the war in Iraq -- 15 percent of its airtime versus 31 percent for MSNBC. CNN devoted a quarter of its airtime to the war.

Another notable aspect of FNC’s news coverage? According to the report:

If Fox was less focused on the Iraq War, what took its place? Mostly—according to the numbers—Anna Nicole Smith. Coverage of her death trailed just barely the airtime spent on the Iraq policy debate, accounting for 9.6% of all the Fox content studied (versus 10.1% for the Iraq policy debate). Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels. The story, which gained real momentum in mid March, consumed a mere 2% of Fox’s total airtime. CNN devoted twice that percent (4%) and MSNBC four times (8%).

And this information isn’t coming from a partisan source. It’s coming from the well-regarded Project for Excellence in Journalism. (Though Roger Ailes disagrees.)

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Tired of Anna Nicole Smith coverage? Richard Huff, New York Daily News TV editor, sure isn't.

"Thanks to a dead Playboy Playmate, daytime television has come alive again. Really," he writes. "Not since they cut out the bulk of the fights on 'Jerry Springer' has watching TV in daytime been so fun - and supremely prurient."

He argues that "[t]he Florida hearing over who got Anna Nicole's rapidly decomposing body had all the elements of good TV" – though he notes that by "good" he doesn't mean, you know, good. More like entertaining.

Anyway, Huff presumably wants all the journo-scolds – you know, those of us who think the news should be somewhat more newsy – to give it a rest.

"Anna Nicole Smith, in life, was a laughingstock in some circles," he writes. "So it's fitting that the hearing over who got her rotting corpse had more laughs than an episode of CBS' 'How I Met Your Mother.'"

Update: Over at Couric & Co, Andrew Cohen shares his Anna Nicole-related dreams, and he's not exactly on the same page as Huff. Cohen wants the media to focus on the Miami competency hearing for Jose Padilla, the alleged terror conspirator, instead of the Anna Nicole saga. He writes:

"In my dream, all the cable television channels showed continuous updates of the proceedings in Miami and those proceedings, despite being in federal court, were televised to the world. Instead of the jackass of a judge presiding over the Smith hearing in state court in Broward County, millions of people instead followed the decorous proceedings inside the austere courtroom of U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, who has bravely refused to be intimidated by the Justice Department into steamrolling Padilla into a conviction."

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Network newsman "Chez" has posted an apology, directed at the American public, for his role in the Anna Nicole Smith coverage. "I'm sorry that we have treated an absolutely meaningless event as if it were somehow nothing short of a cultural earthquake, sure to send reverberations and tremors throughout society until they shake the very foundation -- the very soul -- of every man, woman and child in America," he writes. "I'm sorry that we have devoted hour after hour to discussing and debating such asinine subjects as the paternity of this horrid woman's baby -- even being willing to proclaim, with a straight face, that its father might be the husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor."

It's an entertaining rant, but I'm not buying it. Yes, the media's coverage of Anna Nicole was often tawdry and embarrassing. But it's not as if it was foisted on an unwilling American public. As Lisa de Moraes notes, when "The Situation Room" covered the Smith story last week, the show's audience tripled. The New York Post reported that "coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith boosted the ratings of celebrity newsmagazines like 'Access Hollywood' and 'Entertainment Tonight' last Thursday and Friday."

“I know a lot of people are complaining about [the coverage],” CNN's Wolf Blitzer said at one point. “But a lot of people are also watching.”

There is a tendency for people to bemoan the media's obsession with stories like Anna Nicole while ignoring the fact that public interest is driving the coverage. The vast majority of reporters involved in the Anna Nicole coverage, I would wager, would surely like to have been covering something more significant. But they weren't because Anna Nicole drives ratings.

This isn't to say that the media doesn't deserve some blame for the way they cover stories like this. One could even argue that the press corps helps create our appetite for these kinds of stories by treating real human beings like characters in a soap opera. But there is a large audience for stories like this, and that fact can't entirely be laid at the feet of the media. This hand-wringing about the press corps doing a disservice to the American people by covering stories like this thus rings pretty hollow.

Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times:

Of course, one of the cheapest journalistic tricks going is to get a piece of a mindless, tawdry media frenzy by denouncing it. The writer gets to wallow profitably in whatever gutter has everybody's attention while still being wry and high-minded. The readers get to join the fun without losing their self-respect. It's a win-win sort of arrangement for a certain knowing-wink-and-sly-nod wing of the media culture.

Paul Brownfield, Los Angeles Times:

The centerfold, the gold digger, the demimonde redneck. Anna Nicole Smith is a smorgasbord of easily classified metaphors, each with plenty of "girl gone wild" B-roll…It was news as an episode of "House" or "CSI" or even, given the whiff of hangers-on thrust into commentator roles, "Ugly Betty."…it was all, somehow, as breathtaking as lamentable, because you expected the lamentable part.

Here are the top five pages, in terms of hits, on CBS News partner site The ShowBuzz*:

1. Anna Nicole Smith Dies At 39
2. Anna Nicole Smith Dies At 39
3. Anna Nicole Smith Photo Essay
4. The ShowBuzz Homepage
5. Harry Potter Goes Nude!

And here's an exchange between CNN's Jack Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer from yesterday's episode of CNN's "The Situation Room":

CAFFERTY: Is Anna Nicole Smith still dead, Wolf?

BLITZER: Yes, we're going to -- updating our viewers coming up shortly on...

CAFFERTY: I can't wait for that.

As Blake Hounshell notes, the show brought in medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, reporter John Zarrella, entertainment correspondent Sibla Vargas, reporter Jacki Schechner, and Larry King for commentary, as well as Nancy Grace. The #2 story on the show, which was not discussed during this period? "Iran Shows Off New Missiles."

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OK, let's talk Anna Nicole. There has been nearly wall-to-wall coverage of her death on the cable networks, and all three nightly newscasts covered it as well. The "Evening News" did the story about 10 minutes into the show – you can see it by clicking on the video box at left.

Smith came to be a symbol of our celebrity-saturated media landscape, something not lost on journalists. As TV Newser notes, Brian Williams introduced the NBC "Nightly News" coverage like this: "This may say a lot about our current culture of celebrity and media these days when all the major cable news networks switched over to nonstop live coverage this afternoon when word arrived that Anna Nicole Smith had died."

On CNN, however, anchor Don Lemon said the celebrity factor had little to do with his network's coverage, arguing it was a legal story. "With everything that's going on with Anna Nicole Smith, that's the reason we've covering it, because it sort of supersedes entertainment. There are a couple of lawsuits at stake here, and it's just been a very tumultuous time for her," he said. His colleague Lou Dobbs, meanwhile, gloated in a promo for his program that he wasn't covering the story.

Smith's death was undoubtedly news, and some level of coverage is certainly justifiable. I may be in the minority here, but the coverage doesn't bother me the way coverage of stories like the "runaway bride" did. Smith's life was deeply compelling, deeply weird, and deeply American – Gawker's snotty but not entirely unaffectionate obit illustrates that fairly nicely. And the legal situation her death presents is pretty interesting. Would I like to see the media spend more time on serious matters and less speculating about her death? Sure. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't care about the story at all.

OK, let's talk Anna Nicole. There has been nearly wall-to-wall coverage of her death on the cable networks, and all three nightly newscasts covered it as well. The "Evening News" did the story about 10 minutes into the show – you can see it by clicking on the video box at left.

Smith came to be a symbol of our celebrity-saturated media landscape, something not lost on journalists. As TV Newser notes, Brian Williams introduced the NBC "Nightly News" coverage like this: "This may say a lot about our current culture of celebrity and media these days when all the major cable news networks switched over to nonstop live coverage this afternoon when word arrived that Anna Nicole Smith had died."

On CNN, however, anchor Don Lemon said the celebrity factor had little to do with his network's coverage, arguing it was a legal story. "With everything that's going on with Anna Nicole Smith, that's the reason we've covering it, because it sort of supersedes entertainment. There are a couple of lawsuits at stake here, and it's just been a very tumultuous time for her," he said. His colleague Lou Dobbs, meanwhile, gloated in a promo for his program that he wasn't covering Smith.

Smith's death was undoubtedly news, and some level of coverage is certainly justifiable. I may be in the minority here, but it doesn't bother me the way coverage of stories like the "runaway bride" did. Smith's life was deeply compelling, deeply weird, and deeply American – Gawker's snotty but not entirely unaffectionate obit illustrates that fairly nicely. And the legal situation her death presents is pretty interesting. Would I like to see the media spend more time on more serious matters and less speculating about her death? Sure. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't care about the story at all.

Back in March, Arianna Huffington wrote the following:

It says everything you need to know about the current state of TV news -- indeed the current state of our media culture -- that on a day that saw Iraq moving closer to all-out civil war, with at least 76 Iraqis killed and 179 wounded in sectarian attacks, the CBS Evening News devoted one minute and thirty-nine seconds to coverage of Iraq... and one minute and fifty-six seconds to coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's appearance in front of the Supreme Court. (ellipses in original)

Well, Anna Nicole is back, thanks to a Supreme Court decision in her favor, and Arianna is thus once again assessing "Evening News" coverage of "the Bomb vs Bombshells balance." Writes Huff:

CBS' update of the Smith story was given another minute and fifty-eight seconds of precious air time -- two seconds more than last time -- while its coverage of Iraq lasted two minutes and ten seconds. Aha, you may say, that's 12 seconds more than they gave Anna Nicole, and a 31 second increase from the last time the two stories went head-to-head. True, but Monday was also the third anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech -- a fairly significant news peg, wouldn't you say?

Huffington deems the relative coverage between Smith and the war "seriously out of whack." Now, this is a news judgment question, so I'm not going to bother asking anyone at the "Evening News" about it – all they would likely say is they felt that the Anna Nicole story was an important one. And, well, it is: a victory for federal courts over state courts, a ruling that means federal courts can get involved in these kinds of probate cases, as CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen pointed out. That said, had the Trimspa spokeswoman not been involved in the case, it's safe to say it would not have garnered the same kind of coverage.

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