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Report: Opinion dominates MSNBC

MSNBC offers viewers far more commentary and opinion than either Fox News or CNN, according to a new study, but all of the big three cable networks are increasingly focused on partisan talk and debate.

Opinion filled 85 percent of the content on MSNBC, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 State of the News Media report. On Fox News, commentary made up 55 percent of its coverage, while CNN was the only of the big three cable news channels to produce more straight reporting than opinion. Even so, story packages and daytime live event coverage on CNN was cut down by about half between 2007 and 2012, the report found.

In its study of the cable networks in late 2012, Pew reported that commentary and opinion was "far more prevalent on the air" than straight news reporting, with 63 percent of the airtime devoted to talk compared to 37 percent dedicated to reporting. CNN's coverage was made up of 54 percent reporting compared to 46 percent opinion, while MSNBC had just 15 percent reporting. Fox News, meanwhile, fell between the two with 55 percent commentary and 45 percent reporting.

Overall, the cable news landscape has undergone a major shift as “daytime programming now resembles primetime, with interviews and opinion replacing coverage of live events and breaking news,” the report stated. Interview segments are up 31 percent from 2007 to 2012, while live event coverage dropped 30 percent.

And more broadly, the report “pinpoints multiple signs of shrinking reporting power” across the media spectrum. There are now fewer than 40,000 employees working in newspaper newsrooms, the lowest since 1978, and estimates for newsroom cutbacks puts employment down 30 percent since its peak in 2000, Pew reported. On local TV news, coverage of government and politics has been cut in half, with sports, weather and traffic now making up 40 percent of the content for viewers. And about one in three people, or 31 percent, said they stopped going to a particular news outlet because they felt it no longer offered them the news they were used to getting.

“This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands,” the report said.

According to Pew, that shift was best represented by the 2012 presidential election. Campaign reporters, Pew wrote, “acted more as megaphones, rather than as investigators of the assertions put forward by the campaigns.”

“In the 2012 race, only 27 percent of statements in the media about the character and records of the presidential candidates originated with journalists, while roughly twice that many came from political partisans,” the report stated. “That is a reversal from a dozen years earlier when half came from journalists and a little more than one-third came from the campaigns. At the same time, the campaigns also found more ways than ever to connect directly with citizens.”

With a “continued erosion of reporting resources" amongst news outlets, politicians, government agencies and others now have more opportunities “to take their messages directly to the public,” Pew noted.

And although “horserace coverage was down,” stories focused on issues did not fill that gap in the 2012 cycle, according to Pew.

“In 2012, the amount of coverage devoted to tactics, strategy and polls declined to 38 percent, down from 53 percent in 2008,” the report stated. “But that attention to policy issues — both foreign and domestic — barely budged, inching up from to 22 percent in 2012 compared with 20 percent four years earlier.”

Read the full report here.