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WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 – As the NBA wraps up its season kickoff this weekend and with Major League Baseball having recently completed its World Series, a new study released today showed that the evening news programs of the "Big Three" networks prefer covering baseball's premier event over the more highly watched Super Bowl and comparably rated NBA Finals.
The comprehensive study, commissioned by the Web site RatherBiased.com, also found that among the three networks from 1997 to 2002, the Little League World Series received more coverage than the NBA championship series.
"The NBA clearly came was given the short end of the stick by the Big Three's news divisions," said Matthew W. Sheffield, Co-Director of RatherBiased.com and author of the study.
"Despite the fact that during this six-year time period, which in many ways was a 'golden age' for the NBA with such marquee players as Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal playing at the top of their games, the television networks were more interested in covering children's baseball," Sheffield said.
The NFL didn't fair that much better, either, the study found. The analysis found that the networks' evening news programs ran a total of 26 stories relating to the gameplay of the World Series and 9 to its pint-sized counterpart. In contrast, the NBA and NFL finished with just 7 a piece.
"In all likelihood, this is a demographics problem," Sheffield said. Everyone knows there are few people who are independent or Republican in the news media, apparently there are not very many basketball or football fans, either."
Also examined in the study was the topic of "synergy"—the practice common among media giants of using one property to promote another. Since the Super Bowl was the only sporting event that was broadcast on all three networks during this time-period, RatherBiased.com's researchers focused on it to determine each network's "toady quotient," or tendency to carry water for its sports division. Analyzing transcript data, researchers determined the average number of stories per year about the Super Bowl each news division ran (not including the year its sports division hosted it) and then compared that amount to the number of stories each broadcast during the year its network carried the Super Bowl.
As it turned out, every network was more likely to cover football's championship in the year its sports division was broadcasting the game. The web with the worst "toady quotient" was Disney-owned ABC with 2.3, followed by General Electric's NBC with 2.1. Viacom's CBS came in third with 1.6. In fact, ABC's remarkably inflated (accounting for 37% of its 19 Super Bowl stories) football coverage during 2000 actually made it end up with more stories about the Super Bowl than the World Series. Considered together, World Series and Little League World Series stories amounted to 46% of ABC's four-championship coverage. Reports on MLB and Little League baseball accounted for 56% of CBS's coverage and 59% of NBC's.
"As interesting as that is, what's more interesting is that CBS never carried the World Series and that NBC was the most interested in the big leagues in a year it didn't carry the series, 2001. You would think that only networks carrying the World Series would promote it heavily, but that just wasn't the case," Sheffield said.
Also of note in the synergy context is the fact that although NBC was the home of the NBA finals throughout the six-year period of the study, it never ran any reports trying to generate hype for the games.
"What all this seems to indicate is that while synergy is definitely a factor in the news business, it is less so than the personal preferences of the journalists who cover the news," Sheffield said. "CBS never carried either baseball event yet its evening program devoted the majority of its sports stories to baseball. NBC ran the NBA Finals for six years but the NBC Nightly News never once did a story which might have given attention to the games."
When stories which were related to the game as a cultural event, such as the Super Bowl's famous commercials or the possible threat of terrorism or bad weather spoiling things, the networks showed more interest in the Super Bowl but not in the NBA Finals. Thanks in part to network synergy, coverage of the events surrounding the Super Bowl (including stories where sports was of secondary importance) received about as much coverage as the World Series (even though the Super Bowl attracts far more viewers) with 52 stories to 53, respectively. The Little League World Series received more coverage with 21 stories devoted to it, compared to just 13 for the NBA.
When it came to reporting the results of the contests, baseball again remained the media favorite, garnering 25 stories after the fact with the NFL and NBA coming in distant second and third with 15 and 10 respectively. Little League continued its domination of the NBA with 11 stories.
Overall, CBS proved the most interested in sports with 74 stories mentioning the four championships studied in even an incidental manner. ABC and NBC ran 59 and 45 stories respectively.
Founded two years ago, RatherBiased.com is an independent media criticism Web site devoted to monitoring CBS's news programs and the network TV scene. Proclaimed as "exhaustive, almost scarily so" by the New York Observer, the site features a career-spanning collection of statements, empirical studies, and videos documenting how CBS's star anchorman's views influence his coverage plus separate sections detailing the anchorman's wacky experiences and penchant for strange similes. RatherBiased.com is the largest public collection of information about a journalist on the Internet.
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