Case Study: TV News About TV News
News organizations exist to communicate news and information to their audience. But in the last 5 years, top television news networks in the United States have been the subjects of increased news coverage themselves.
In the period that our research team has been monitoring (January 2010 to present), many observers have noted that news is becoming increasingly polarized along political lines, reflecting (and possibly driving) the general atmosphere of rising partisanship. At the same time, discussions of “fake news” and frequent conflicts between politicians and journalistic outlets have made media bias a common topic of discussion. The vitriol resulting from these repeated conflicts has culminated in physical attacks on journalists, such as those that unfolded during the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020.
In this environment, US cable TV news channels, including the three that we study (FOX, CNN, and MSNBC), are increasingly dedicating screen time to discussion of how other news outlets cover controversial topics, in addition to doing their own reporting and analysis. Geraldine Moriba, a news executive and Stanford University Brown Institute for Media Innovation researcher says in her experience, “cable news editors are keenly aware of the content on rival networks, and consider it key to their daily news reporting. Media monitoring and analysis is no longer limited to media reporters.”
To evaluate how these commonly-discussed trends might show up in data quantifying who and what appears on TV news, we decided to take a closer look at how news networks talk about each other. We used our publicly-available site, the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, which allows anyone to quickly gather a lot of information on this issue with only a few search queries.
One of the common framings used to discuss media bias is the concept of “fake news”. This term was first used to name fabricated news stories spread on social media but quickly morphed into a rhetorical tool used by politicians to discredit established media organizations when they disagreed with their coverage. In particular, Donald Trump embraced the term, turning it into a catchphrase that he used to attack outlets like CNN, MSNBC, The Times and The Washington Post.
We can search for all occurrences of the term “fake news” on air from January 2010 onwards across the three networks that we track. Using labels generated using Amazon’s Rekognition celebrity face recognition API, our tool can also restrict this search to time intervals when President Donald Trump’s face is on screen. This lets us get a rough estimate of how much of the coverage of “fake news” on cable TV is driven by Trump’s use of the term.
We see that after an initial burst of coverage following the final days of the 2016 Presidential election, discussion of fake news rises in prominence, peaking in February 2017, when Trump briefly excluded the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and other media outlets that he had labeled “fake news” from press briefings at the White House. After this, the discussion gradually trails off over the next four years.
During the years 2017–2020, Trump’s face is on screen 17% of the time “fake news” is said. Mentions of fake news in this category have decreased more slowly than the rest, suggesting that the term is becoming more closely associated with Trump as time goes on; When “fake news” was mentioned in 2020, Trump’s face was on screen 27% of the time. Of course, Trump’s face could be on screen for several reasons — he could be the one saying the phrase, a still image of him could be shown on-screen while a commentator discusses the topic or his face might appear coincidentally in a chyron advertising an upcoming program. Using the Cable TV News viewer, you can watch the source video clips that these aggregate numbers are based upon to get a sense of how frequently these different scenarios arise.
Another simple metric that we can use to try to quantify the increasing amount of “news about the news” is the number of mentions of each network’s name on each of the other three networks across the last decade. To make the comparisons between stations more fair, we normalize these mentions by dividing them by the total amount of content on each channel*.
Looking at the data, several interesting facts emerge:
- Starting in 2015, Fox begins to mention CNN much more frequently
- At the same time, CNN also begins to mention Fox much more frequently
- Starting in 2015, MSNBC also begins to mention CNN more frequently.
- However, CNN’s mentions of MSNBC stay relatively constant.
- After a declining trend in the first half of the decade, from 2015 onwards MSNBC begins to mention Fox News more frequently.
- There is no corresponding increase of mentions of MSNBC on Fox news.
Notably, we see these trends begin more than a year before the emergence of the term “fake news”, which only took place near the end of the 2016 presidential election cycle. These earlier conflicts set the stage for the debate surrounding fake news, and especially Donald Trump’s unique interpretation of the phrase.
In general, MSNBC is mentioned much less than the other two networks, even though it is considered to be farther left than CNN (and so one might expect that it would air more commentary that would be provocative to FOX’s viewership, and therefore of interest to them). On average, MSNBC was mentioned on FOX around 1200 times a year, while MSNBC mentions FOX a whopping 5300 times a year on average.
A large amount of the increase post-2015 takes the form of pronounced peaks in the graphs, which represent the months that have the highest number of mentions of a given network. We find that many of these peaks occur during public conflicts between politicians and the network that is being discussed.
For example, CNN received most mentions on FOX in June and July 2017 during Trump’s public conflict with the network over CNN’s coverage of the Russia investigation. MSNBC dedicated far less screen time to this conflict — in July 2017, there were nearly on-air 1500 mentions of CNN on FOX news, but only around 300 on MSNBC.
MSNBC’s peak month on CNN is January 2014, after a “messy divorce” with then-governor of NJ Chris Christie, who had previously been a frequent face on the network. Christie publicly attacked the network as partisan after they aggressively pursued the “Bridgegate” scandal.
Finally, Fox News’ largest overall peak occurs on MSNBC in August 2015, during Trump’s conflicts with the network because of what he perceived as unfair treatment from moderator Megyn Kelly during a Republican Primary debate. There is another small peak for mentions of FOX on CNN in January, the month that Trump pointedly skipped a second debate hosted by Kelly.
There are also other peaks in coverage that don’t involve conflicts between networks and politicians. For example, there are peaks that follow scandals at specific news stations, such as the firing of Bill O’Reilly from FOX following sexual harassment allegations. Similarly, the most mentions of MSNBC on CNN occur after prominent anchor Keith Olbermann left the network due to creative differences.
Occasionally, networks were in the news for more dramatic events. The most mentions of CNN on MSNBC occur in October 2018, when pipe bombs were mailed to prominent Democrats, as well as to CNN headquarters.
Of course, we are only pointing out some possible explanations by noting events that happened during or shortly before we see peaks in these keyword occurrences. There are a host of reasons for the recent turn from TV news networks serving as producers of news to networks being actors in news stories themselves. Dive into the data and take a look for yourself by clicking on the chart that you’re interested in!
* While we have almost 24/7 coverage of each channel from January 1, 2010 to the present day, there are some time intervals where footage is missing. This is why we need this normalization if we want to be as accurate as possible when making cross-channel comparisons. However, the results don’t change very much if you remove the NORMALIZE clause from the query. Take a look at the Advanced Queries section of our site for more details.
