Presidential Election Top Story of Year 2000, Say 2 News Surveys

The top network news story of the year 2000, according to two separate studies, was the presidential election in all its various guises, from campaign to post-election legal wrangling. In one study, done by Andrew Tyndall’s New York-based ADT Research, the election accounted for 21% of weekday coverage on ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts.

Beyond that, though, the two surveys--the other was done by the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs--differ in their conclusions. The studies are often cited by critics who want to make one point or another about the state of network newscasts, which combined reach some 30 million viewers on average each week.

Tyndall, who only tracks weekday broadcasts and calculates his list according to the number of minutes devoted to a story, found that the saga of Cuban child Elian Gonzalez was the runner-up to election news in the most-covered topics list, followed by the gyrations of the stock market, which didn’t even make the CMPA list (CMPA says it includes market stories only on a separate list it keeps of coverage of various broad topics.)

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Rising gas and oil prices came next on Tyndall’s list, followed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Next came Firestone tires and sport-utility-vehicle safety, the nation’s wildfires, the transition to the Bush administration, the USS Cole bombing and the Olympic Games.

CMPA, which tracks newscasts seven days a week and counts the number of stories devoted to each subject regardless of length, focused on the return to domestic news in 2000, after 1999’s heavy emphasis on stories with datelines such as Bosnia, Chechnya and East Timor. Beyond election news, CMPA found that Israel was the top story, followed by Elian Gonzalez and gas and oil prices. Rounding out its list were wildfires, problems with Firestone tires, the bombing of the USS Cole and the presidential transition.

The biggest discrepancy between the two is Israel. The difference, both sides say, is that Tyndall broke off stories about the pope’s visit to Israel as a separate category, while CMPA included it, and that one-sixth of CMPA’s Israel total were broadcast on weekends.

Other findings: CMPA says that for the first time since 1993, no specific crime or scandal story made the top 10, while Tyndall finds that NBC’s Robert Hager, who covers transportation, got the most air time of any network reporter, anchors excluded.