BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its exhaustive Annual Report on American Journalism, and we were drawn to its assessment of the coverage of the war in Iraq on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The cable news channels, it turns out, didn't have all that much in common when it came to things like balance, use of anonymous sources, or the ratio of straight reporting to opinion. Now we know with scientific exactitude, which cable channel offered the most one-sided, opinionated war coverage by far. Here, with the shocking results is - nah, just kidding. Here to inform us of the obvious is PEJ's senior associate Dante Chinni. Welcome to OTM.

DANTE CHINNI: Thank you for having me on.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, part of your study focuses on the major cable news channels. Now, time was when we expected TV anchors and reporters to give us the news without adding their opinions. Could you compare the performances of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News?

DANTE CHINNI: Well, they're just very different news products, when you look at the opinion. We're talking about anchors or reporters actually giving views on the stories they're talking about. Four percent of the time you would find opinion in a CNN piece; 27 percent of the time you'd find opinion in pieces on MSNBC, and 68 percent of the time you'd find it on Fox.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yowza. Now, Fox has a reputation for being skewed to the right. You did the research. Does the data tell us which station is most lopsided in its coverage?

DANTE CHINNI: Fox puts a lot of its opinion in there, but we didn't look at those specific opinions to see if they leaned to the right or to the left. The one thing we did look at was the coverage of the Iraq war and determine whether it's positive or negative - whether things are going good or poorly in Iraq, and CNN and MSNBC it was pretty evenly split between positive pieces about Iraq and negative pieces about Iraq. But Fox it really stood out that there was a big discrepancy. There was much more positive, and much less negative. Their positive and their no opinion or no slant was about even. Their negative was much, much lower.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And how did you measure it?

DANTE CHINNI: We're looking at three different time periods. We looked at the afternoon or the daytime shows. Then we tried to look at their signatures newscasts, which for Fox was Brit Hume, for CNN was Aaron Brown, and for MSNBC was Keith Olbermann's show. And then we also looked at their evening talk shows. So, that would be Bill O'Reilly, Larry King and Chris Matthews. What we do is go through the stories and code them for language, and now we didn't do this ourselves. We have researchers up in Princeton who do a lot of the hard work for us. All together, talking about newspapers, cable, network, online, we coded some 17,000 stories.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And hundreds of hours of television programming.

DANTE CHINNI: Absolutely.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you already mentioned that Fox tends to be more positive in the coverage of the Iraq war than CNN and MSNBC. But what about other measurements of good reporting, like, for instance, sourcing.

DANTE CHINNI: Fox does a better job of explaining who the sources are and telling you who's telling them what they're hearing. CNN does less a good job of that. However, Fox's sources also tend to be much more one-sided. Their reports tend to be much more one-sided than the reports on CNN. So, in other words, CNN you may not know who is telling you what you're hearing, but it's more balanced, and Fox, [LAUGHS] you, you know where you're getting it from, but it's coming more from one side.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. Well, we had heard in dispatches from the war that Fox News reporters were able to get to generals and people in the field a lot faster than, say, CNN's reporters could.

DANTE CHINNI: Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, they just have a better relationship with the administration.

DANTE CHINNI: Well, you could argue that. Absolutely.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is there any evidence to suggest that we, as news consumers, actually prefer this mix of commentary with news, a la Fox, to the straight news variety? After all, it is Fox News that seems to be gaining viewers.

DANTE CHINNI: Fox would argue that the ratings are the proof, and they would say yes. Fox has made a very conscious decision to do what they're doing. But CNN's counter is - yes, if you look at the ratings, Fox has higher ratings than we do. But if you were to go through the month, and look at the cumulative ratings - that is, individuals tuning in to each station over the course of the month, CNN actually has more, and they suggest obviously what that means is the people who view CNN are coming by to get the news. They get the news, and they leave. Or they click by to catch headlines, and they leave. Fox's viewers are much more like - it's a talk radio model of how these things operate, where you tune in, and I'm watching this because I have a relationship with this network. We see the world in the same way, kind of thing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, to recap - Fox offers more lopsided news, or at least it did on the war, and far more opinion - not labeled as opinion - in its newscasts. So, what would the Project for Excellence in Journalism do with the Fox slogan "We report. You decide."

DANTE CHINNI: They, themselves, have even backed away from it a little bit and now say "Fair and balanced," which is obviously a little bit trickier term - fair to whom, and balanced as compared to what? [LAUGHTER] But "We report, you decide," might have to be "We spin, and you determine what you want."

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Or "We report - and decide?"

DANTE CHINNI: [LAUGHS] That's, that's a lot easier. You don't have to change as many words that way. [LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dante Chinni, thank you very much.

DANTE CHINNI: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dante Chinni is a senior associate with the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The full report can be found at the website StateoftheMedia.org. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, a tale of two countries - how the news is delivered in Lebanon and Jordan.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. [FUNDING CREDITS]

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