Introduction
Television's three 24-hour cable news channels are in the throes of a modern-day version of that old-fashioned journalistic tradition: a circulation war. The battle for viewers includes talent raids, publicity stunts, juggled line-ups and insinuations of ideological bias. At the same time, the national news agenda is beginning to revert to its normal priorities after the crisis coverage of the attacks of last September and the subsequent U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Amid this flux in audience, content, line-up and personalities, this project took a snapshot of primetime cable news programming on Cable News Network (CNN), Fox News Channel (FNC) and MSNBC at the end of January 2002. We selected one week of programming from January 21st (Martin Luther King Day), through Friday, January 25th. That week saw the premiere of MSNBC's new show "Making Sense" with anchor Alan Keyes and CNN's announcement of its hiring of new primetime anchor Connie Chung. Two weeks after the sample week analyzed here, FNC too changed its lineup, introducing CNN's former anchor Greta Van Susteren.

Each network mixes interview shows with newscasts during the course of the evening. All three networks were still running special programs devoted exclusively to crisis coverage of the war on terrorism. In the week analyzed, that crisis saw two major developments: the legality of the military detention camp for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay under the Geneva Conventions and John Walker Lindh, the Californian Muslim man found fighting for the Taliban at Mazar-e-Sharif, arriving in Virginia to face trial for conspiracy.

CNN made use of half-hour shows; FNC and MSNBC used an hour-long format throughout the evening. We studied the content of each network's news reporting on the first four days of the week and their interviews on all five days. FNC runs its flagship newscast, "Special Report" anchored by Brit Hume, early in the evening, so we started monitoring FNC at 6 p.m. each evening (7 p.m. for the other two networks). CNN ran one of its flagship half-hour interviews, "Greenfield At Large" anchored by Jeff Greenfield, at a later hour so we finished monitoring CNN at 11:30 p.m. (11 p.m. for the other two networks).

This study was produced for "The NewsHour" by ADT Research, an independent non-partisan news monitoring organization that publishes the Tyndall Report, a weekly faxsheet that monitors the content of the network nightly newscasts. ADT Research started its news monitoring database in 1987 and also analyzes the broadcast networks' morning programs, "Today", "Good Morning America" and "The Early Show". For this project, a total of 67.5 hours of programming was videotaped and analyzed by a staff of three for story selection and format. Interview segments were isolated and given special scrutiny to measure guest selection and interviewing style.