All Dan All The Time
: Andrew Tyndall — who publishes a respected report on network news coverage — posts this in a comment below, reacting to my reaction to Glenn Reynolds’ post about blog (and thus media) coverage of scandals v issues. He starts quoting Glenn:
“If the Big Media were talking more about issues, and less — to pick RatherGate as the example which I think inspired this conversation — about Bush’s National Guard service, probably bloggers would be talking about issues more, too.”
As big a story as the 60 Minutes memos are in media circles and the blogosphere, it is flat out untrue that it has dominated campaign coverage in the aforesaid Big Media.
Last week on the three networks’ nightly newscasts combined (including CBS, which spent extended time to defending its own reporting), the memos accounted for less than one quarter of all Campaign 2004 coverage (14 minutes out of 61). The previous week–when the story broke–it was a similar small proportion (17 minutes out of 68). Our tracking data on campaign coverage is archived at http://www.tyndallreport.com/campaign.html.
Valuable data. Is one quarter a lot?
