About ADT Research

Headed by analyst and former NBC television consultant Andrew Tyndall, ADT Research publishes the Tyndall Report, a newsletter analyzing the nightly newscasts of the three major broadcast television networks.

The Tyndall Report examines how major news stories are covered, tracks statistical trends and comments on the networks’ journalistic performance. The group’s database reaches back to August 1987.

An independent, non-partisan organization, ADT Research contributed daily content to Inside.com in 1999 and 2000, and is currently affiliated with mediachannel.org.

Content Analysis
The following is ADT Research's report on the content of the three cable news networks as commissioned by the "NewsHour".

The report is broken into five segments:
Highlights -- A quick summary of the report's findings.
Introduction -- The formal introduction to the report.
Newscasts -- Analysis of newscast-format programs.
Interviews -- Analysis of interview-format programs.
Conclusion -- The full summary of ADT Research's findings.

The report begins with the Highlights section below.

Highlights
"The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" commissioned a detailed analysis of the primetime content of the three 24-hour cable news channels: Cable News Network, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. The study examined one week of programming at the end of January 2002.

CNN was primarily a newsgathering network. It:
Relied on its corps of correspondents in the field
Concentrated more on the top stories of the day
Adhered to an objective and restrained interviewing style

FNC was primarily an opinion network. It:
Staged most interviews in a confrontational format
Asked questions in an opinionated and combative style
Selected interview guests with partisan, forensic and military backgrounds
Relied on a panel of in-house analysts for interpretation

Evidence that CNN and FNC occupy different points on the ideological spectrum (FNC to the right of CNN) includes:

The composition of FNC's panel of in-house analysts
The content of anchor Bill O'Reilly's commentaries
Contrasting story selection over Enron and race relations stories

However, these differences are mere nuances that inflect content during the course of primetime programming. They do not dominate the tone of either network. Of much greater impact are the stylistic differences between CNN and FNC. FNC has a breezy, irreverent, opinionated, combative style that serves as a megaphone to exaggerate underlying ideological differences.

All three cable news channels present a male-dominated worldview. At the time of this study there were only two female anchors. Fewer than 25 percent of all interview guests were female. Many news beats that have traditionally been thought of as interesting female audiences: health and medicine, education, arts and culture, for example, were under-covered by all three networks.