ArticlePloS one2025
No news is good news? The declining information value of broadcast news in America.
Article in PloS one, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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0 citing papers in PubMed.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite the rise of digital media, Americans are five times more likely to consume news via television than through online platforms. However, due in large part to technical hurdles, it remains unclear what content appears on broadcast news and how the mixture of content has changed over time. We consider these questions by applying a novel LLM-based approach to an understudied corpus of expert-generated summaries of virtually all news segments aired on the "big three" broadcast networks-ABC, CBS, and NBC-between 1969 and 2024. Results based on nearly one million news segments show that "information density"-the amount of time dedicated to political issues-has declined substantially over the last 50 years. Today, broadcast news spends roughly twice as much time on commercials and "soft" news and half as much on issue-based political coverage compared to a few decades ago. Since the early 1990s, the news has also shifted inward, focusing more on domestic stories and less on international affairs. These changes suggest a transformation in the informative role of broadcast news, raising questions about its impact on voter knowledge and political engagement.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.