Categories: OLD Media Moves

TV is ignoring the LIBOR scandal

Mark Gongloff of The Huffington Post writes about how television news isn’t paying much attention to the LIBOR rigging scandal.

Gongloff writes, “The scandal that has been not-crazily called the biggest financial scandal in history has gotten all of zero minutes’ air time on the ABC and NBC nightly news broadcasts and only a little more time than that on CBS and the major cable news channels, according to a report by the progressive media watchdog Media Matters.

“Who cares, you might be thinking, who watches TV news any more? Not as many, any more, but most people still consider TV their primary news source.

“Media Matters did a Nexis search for all the times Libor and Barclays and other search terms related to the scandal got mentioned on prime-time broadcasts since the scandal broke in June and found next to bupkus:

After spending roughly six and a half minutes combined covering the scandal on their evening newscasts and opinion programming between June 27 and July 12, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News devoted less than 32 minutes to stories related to the controversy from July 13 to July 28, with more than two-thirds of that coverage coming from CNN.

“So, to recap, the major TV outlet covering Libor the most is the one that nobody watches, CNN.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.