No news is good news? The declining information value of broadcast news in America
Fig 2
The composition of a typical 30-minute evening news broadcast between 1969 and 2024. Broadcast year is shown on the x-axis, and the proportion of time allotted to each type of content in minutes out of a typical 30-minute broadcast is shown on the y-axis. The content each band represents is indicated by the corresponding color: “other” programming not recorded in the broadcast in gray; commercials in dark purple; “empty” segments with no abstract in lavender; soft news in blue; low-quality non-issue news (see S4 Table) in turquoise; high-quality non-issue news in light green; and issue-based news in yellow. Over this 50-year period, the duration of time allotted to different types of news content changes dramatically, with increasing time spent on less substantive types of programming.