Rating the news
IN TRYING TO determine whether the quality of local news segments had any relation to ratings, the researchers behind the book "We Interrupt This Newscast" had to design a reliable measure of quality. They asked a team of widely respected TV news directors, news executives, and producers to put together a list of attributes that they all agreed defined good journalism.
The researchers then set up a scoring system. A news segment that grew out of an investigation that the TV station itself initiated, for example, earned more points for "journalistic enterprise" than a segment on a prescheduled event like a press conference. Stories on "ideas, issues, or policy" earned more points for significance than those on celebrities, sports, or weather. Stories with more sources and more viewpoints were worth more than those with fewer.
Then the researchers had recordings made of major news shows from 50 TV markets between 1998 and 2002, and had each segment scored by the firm Princeton Survey Research Associates. The resulting scores were matched against the Nielsen ratings, with various controls to take into account everything from lead-in programming to network affiliation, size of market, and time slot.
Analyzing their results, the researchers found a strong correlation between high quality scores and high ratings. For example, "issue-based, policy-relevant" stories, like a piece on a gasoline tax increase, beat out entertainment stories, like a piece on the premiere of a movie, by a quarter of a ratings point. Each ratings point represents 1 percent of the households in a TV market. Pieces with the highest values for "journalistic enterprise" beat out those with the lowest by over half a ratings point. And stories with broader civic impact, like a piece on the closing of a large local employer, beat out those of purely personal impact, like a piece on a new diet, by 1.4 ratings points. (By chance, in September, 1.4 ratings points is what separated WCVB's and WHDH's 6 p.m. newscasts.)
While the ratings differences aren't enormous, coauthor Tom Rosenstiel says he was surprised by the strength of the findings. As he sees it, they show that running a frivolous or sensationalized story hurts ratings. Bad journalism, Rosenstiel argues, "is actually economically self-destructive." - D.B.
