This past week was a big week for news, especially in national politics. But how well does the mainstream media cover the stories and issues that really impact Americans? This post is my attempt to quantitatively track one small sample of the overall MSM news coverage, namely MSNBC's "Scarborough Country". I intend to post my results each week, and analyze what is good and bad about Joe Scarborough's news coverage.

As I've said in previous posts, my sense is that overall the MSM does a pretty shoddy job of covering the news, current events and issues of public interest and importance. Generally the media seems dominated by celebrity trials, or sensationalized, shocking crimes and trends towards what used to be the sole domain of the tabloids. But I don't really have any way to quantify why I feel this way. It's really a general sense I get from watching the cable news channels and reading MSM web sites. In the past I've had posts that quantify the apparent obsession with a few criminal cases, and a seemingly disproportionate amount of media coverage. For last week's "Scarborough Country" this feeling certainly seems to hold true. Before getting into the specifics of last week's coverage I'd like to qualify how my data was collected.

I Tivo'ed each show (gotta love Tivo!) and watched the show noting the show's topic, and the start and end time of each topic, as shown by my Tivo's time bar. It should be noted that the Tivo time bar is in minutes. Consequently I cannot measure more precise than the minute readings. Thus, there is a truncation error (maximum of 59 seconds) that may occur at the beginning and end of each measurement. I assume this error is randomly distributed and should not greatly impact the results. My data is not precise down to the second, but I will also say that it is accurate. I do not count time given for commercials, time given for MSNBC's news update, and time where Joe Scarborough is introducing the show and its topics. The remaining time, which I record for each topic, I refer to as "useful on-air time" or simply "useful time".

Looking at the distribution of last week's show (see pie chart above), it seems that my general sense of disproportionate news coverage certainly holds true for last week's "Scarborough Country". I don't even know where to begin in pointing out how lop-sided the show's coverage was. How about zero time dedicated to the war in Iraq? That seems crazy. What also seems crazy is that Joe dedicated more time to bash actor Donald Sutherland's remarks about Bush than he did talking about Tom Delay and the Rove/Plame case combined. Joe Scarborough took time in his broadcast three days in a row to basically call Donald Sutherland a sissy, overly emotional, and imply that he's being a bad American by criticizing Bush overseas.

The good aspect of the show has to be the amount of time dedicated to hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction efforts, which took up the largest proportion of the show's time for the week (one third). There is huge public interest in following that story. There are billions of tax dollars being spent (and miss-spent) to recover from the hurricanes and the American people deserve answers as to why the government was so inadequately prepared.

Unless you are the friends and family of Natalie Holloway (Alabama high school student missing in Aruba, as if I had to clarify that) or George Smith (missing cruise ship honeymooner) it seems that the coverage of these two high-profile cases is completely disproportionate. Granted that these are two very tragic cases, and I certainly hope they are solved soon, but no one could possibly argue that this is as important or tragic as the hurricane disaster. Yet these two cases were given virtually the same focus and attention as the hurricane disaster. Last week Joe Scarborough even addressed the criticism leveled at his show for the amount of coverage given to the Holloway case. His defense was that there is something about the case that just makes Americans care. There's no doubt Americans care. And I'm sure the local community in Alabama has mobilized to do what they can to help and get answers. I'm sure the congressman and senators from that state are involved. But I don't see why this case needs national attention or how it is that Joe Scarborough feels that two missing person cases deserve as much focus as the hurricane reconstruction or the Supreme Court nomination. Like I've said in the past, unless it's Dick Cheney missing in Aruba, why on earth is it getting so much national attention? By the way, the Supreme Court nomination accounted for 9% of the show, while the controversy dominated many other headlines. Joe Scarborough just seems completely out of touch on that one.

The details for last week's shows are shown in the table below.