Cable News Networks Increase Amount and Public Accessibility of Incivility, Annenberg Public Policy Center Study Finds

For Immediate Release

March 27, 2012

Contact: Kathleen Hall Jamieson (info@flackcheck.org)
Jamieson is Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, home of FlackCheck.org, a site whose “They said WHAT?” page flags extreme rhetoric of both the left and right and includes a video illustrating these findings.
 
Background: When the January 2011 tragedy in Tucson sparked concerns about incivility and the coarsening of the media culture, an eight person research team at the Annenberg Public Policy Center decided to replace speculation with scholarship by studying the ways in which MSNBC, CNN, and FOX covered 38 uncivil statements by or about political leaders, groups or activists, 19 by or about liberals/progressives and 19 by or about conservatives. Instances were located by searching the Lexis-Nexis and Thomas data bases. The study analyzed all cable news coverage of these incidents within seven days of the remark or behavior. (To read an earlier APPC study on Civility in Congress, click here: https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Civility_9-27-2011_Final1.pdf.)
 
Focus of Study: 38 incidents were selected to create paired comparisons of messages by or about those on the political left and right (see Table 1). The focus included:

• analogies to Nazi Germany;
• extreme characterizations of an opponent (e.g., opponents as “barbarians” or a “mob”);
• use of the language of violence (including Governor Perry’s mock threat to get “ugly” with Fed Chair Ben Bernanke if he were to go to Texas after pursuing loose monetary policy and Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa’s call to “take these sons of bitches out”);
• extreme characterizations of legislation (including the notion that senior citizens would die under the opposing side’s health plan);
• allegations that the president of an opposing party had lied (Rep. Wilson’s “You lie,” and statements by Democrats on the Floor of the House alleging that President George W. Bush had lied);
• dismissive or demeaning references to the president (i.e., calling President George W. Bush a “loser,” and President Obama “kind of a dick”).
• dismissive or demeaning references to others (e.g., labeling a female lobbyist a “K street whore,” and a female senator a “hooker,” characterizing First Lady Michelle Obama’s behavior as “uppity-ism,” or Newt Gingrich as a “fat, repulsive pig!”
• when the level of coverage of one side’s example was substantially greater than that of the other, we paired the more frequently covered single instance (e.g., Rep. Wilson “You lie”) with multiple instances of a less covered parallel on the other (Democrats accusing President Bush of lying). We did the same by pairing a more frequently covered Democratic representative’s statement that the uninsured would die under the Republican health care plan (i.e., Rep. Grayson) with multiple instances of Republicans making the same sort of statement.

 
Findings:There are instances of extreme speech by both left and right in each of the categories analyzed by this study (for illustrations see the video “Coverage of Incivility in Cable Network News” at FlackCheck.org).

• Non-traditional media have increased both the amount of accessible uncivil communication and the amount of access to what exists elsewhere.

Almost half of the 38 studied instances occurred in non-traditional media. Six occurred on talk radio, seven on cable networks, and three in email or on the web (see Table 2).

• We found agreement across the cable networks that comparisons to Hitler, Goebbels, Nazis, or the Holocaust were out of bounds.

• Overall, MSNBC features conservative transgressions more often than liberal ones, and Fox does the opposite (see Table 3). As a result, MSNBC viewers witnessed a greater number of conservative outbursts, while FOX viewers saw more outrageous rhetoric tied to the left. In general, MSNBC and FOX’s coverage of these instances magnified the sense that incivility in contemporary political discourse was the fault of those on the other side of the ideological divide. By contrast, CNN was more likely than either MSNBC or FOX to flag transgressions on both sides.

Where Obama-Hitler analogies were more likely to be decried on MSNBC and CNN, Nazi analogies and threats against Republican Governor Walker were more often critiqued on Fox.

Where a FOX viewer was more likely to learn that Democrat Alan Grayson had labeled an advisor to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke a “K Street whore,” the viewer tuned to MSNBC was more likely to hear that Glenn Beck had characterized Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu as a hooker.

The differences between FOX and MSNBC are significant and can be predicted by knowing the ideology of the transgressor.

• Unsurprisingly, cable networks don’t publicize untoward comments by their own correspondents. It was FOX that reminded viewers about MSNBC host David Shuster’s suggestion that Chelsea [Clinton] was “sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way” by the Hillary Clinton campaign. CNN highlighted Mark Halperin’s observation on MSNBC that President Obama came off as “kind of a dick” at a press conference. MSNBC reminded viewers that a FOX host had used the phrase “terrorist fist jab” to describe a gesture between Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife at a 2008 campaign stop.

• Not featured in the analyzed cable representations of incivility was the question, “How typical is the other side’s uncivil behavior and language?” As a result, repeated play of single instances of rude, crude, or lewd political language and behavior probably makes it seem more prevalent than it actually is.

APPENDIX:

Members of the research team: Kelsey Ferguson, Jaclyn Gulliver, Laura Johnson, Rebecca Kaplan, Anna Tsiotsias, Phillip Venice, and Allyson Volinsky. The research team was supervised by Ilana Weitz and directed by Kathleen Hall Jamieson. The video illustrating the release was created by FlackCheck.org’s Daniel Corkery.

TABLE 1: INSTANCES STUDIED

TABLE 2: INSTANCES BY LOCATION AND MEDIUM

TABLE 3: PERCENTAGE OF COVERAGE PER INCIDENT BY NETWORK OVER 7 DAY PERIOD*

Limitations of the Study:

A number of individuals whose coverage was captured by the study are no longer on the three studied cable news networks (e.g., Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann).

Because the search strategy involved word searches of all programming available on these three networks in the LexisNexis Academic data base, shows with a partisan bent (for example, “Hannity” and “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”) are not separated from those without such a tilt on the networks.

The unit of analysis is any mention in a discussion of one of the 38 instances in a single show or program. Each show is assigned a code of one or zero. Any mention of an incident gives the show a count of one. If a show discussed the incident in multiple segments, the show was coded as one.

Because the number of shows for which Lexis possesses transcripts is not necessarily equal for all networks, we normalized the data by obtaining archived TV listings data for each time period from Tribune Media Services and calculating a percentage of actual coverage from total possible coverage per network (Table 3). We defined each entry in the TV listings as one program. Because networks replay some show multiple times in a day, we considered only one airing of a show (e.g. Anderson Cooper 360