Network morning shows and cable news fuelled the frenzied coverage of Playmate and heiress Anna Nicole Smith's death and the hysteria that followed leading to her burial, a study by a leading media watchdog group has found.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), in its study ‘Anna Nicole Smith – Anatomy of a Feeding Fenzy’, found that in the three weeks between Smith's death and burial, the story came up just short of being the most-covered news of the period among all media reporting. Only the Iraq War and 2008 election drew more coverage. The Smith story, however, was pushed mostly by a handful of outlets.
Cable news programmes devoted 22 per cent of their airtime to the Smith story from February 8 to March 2, double the amount given to the second-biggest story, the presidential campaign, the PEJ study found. News Corp's Fox News Channel devoted 32 per cent of its total airtime to the story, MSNBC gave 21 per cent and CNN allotted 14 per cent. MSNBC is owned by General Electric Co; CNN is a unit of Time Warner Inc.
The percentages would have been higher, the study admitted, if two of the personalities who covered the story most extensively – CNN's Larry King and Fox's Greta Van Susteren -- were included in its index of media outlets. "Larry King Live" included the story in 16 of the 21 shows in the survey period; "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" devoted part of 16 out of its 17 shows to Smith-related coverage.
"The Anna Nicole Smith story, all told, was a serious preoccupation of the news media," said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the journalism project. "But if you look inside this frenzy you find that most media outlets and most media sectors after the first two days just treated this story at arm's length."
Across all media, the study found 30 per cent of news coverage was devoted to Smith in the first two days of the story. Cable news gave 55 per cent of its airtime to the story in its first hours. The study found that while most sectors of the media eased off after the first two days, the network morning shows and, particularly, cable news shows continued to give the story heavy airtime.
The study found that network morning news shows gave 15 per cent of their first half-hour of programming to the Smith story, compared to 2 per cent of their evening counterparts. Taking all media outlets into consideration, the Smith story's 8 per cent of total coverage was just short of the 9 per cent devoted to the war and 2008 election, and well ahead of the time and space given to such stories as the February stock market plunge, the Scooter Libby trial and the nuclear deal with North Korea.
"When cable really finds a megastory to dwell on," Jurkowitz said, "they can really set the water-cooler agenda for what people end up talking about."
Fox defended its coverage, saying, "We've invested in covering the Anna Nicole story as much as every other media outlet, including the Associated Press (AP)." CNN and MSNBC declined to comment to AP.
