If You Watch FIVE HOURS of Cable News, Expect to Find ONE MINUTE of Coverage Devoted to Either Science or the Environment

Pew has released its annual “State of the Media” report with detailed summaries of their content analysis on each sector of the news media. I will be blogging about this report over the next couple of weeks, but for now, consider one of the more interesting findings from the analysis of cable news coverage, a finding that underscores the problem of choice for news audiences I have detailed on this blog before. Based on their analysis of the combined year long content at the cable news outlets, Pew concludes:

Collectively, the broad range of domestic issues including the environment, education, transportation, development, religion, domestic terrorism, health care, race — everything but immigration — made up 13% of the time on cable (compared with 26% on network evening news). The three topics of celebrity, crime and disasters, in contrast, accounted for 24% of cable’s time.

To put that into perspective, if one were to have watched five hours of cable news, one would have seen about:

* 35 minutes about campaigns and elections
* 36 minutes about the debate over U.S. foreign policy
* 26 minutes or more of crime
* 12 minutes of accidents and disasters
* 10 minutes of celebrity and entertainment

On the other hand, one would have seen:

* 1 minute and 25 seconds about the environment
* 1 minute and 22 seconds about education
* 1 minute about science and technology
* 3 minutes and 34 seconds about the economy
* 3 minutes and 46 seconds about health and health care