Top 20 network TV stories of 2013: Mea culpa, sort of

I have to admit that I rarely watch television news. For one thing, I just don't take the time to sit in front of the TV for half an hour or longer. I also must say that my impression of TV news is, for the most part, like the old beer commercial: tastes great, less filling. There just seems to be a lot of repetition and vacuous fluff that passes for news.

So I was a little surprised, but willing to admit my bias, when I saw this chart on the Pew Research Center website. It lists the top 20 stories covered by ABC, CBS and NBC, rated by the cumulative number of minutes of coverage, for 2013. With the exception of Prince George's birth, I consider everything on the list to be pretty substantive. So kudos to them.

However, the chart does not (and cannot) describe the type of coverage. I still believe that some network coverage of these stories is sensationalized or dumbed down to the lowest common denominator (do the reporters really have to stand out in the hurricane-force wind?). And when you consider that the three networks' newscasts total a little more than 24,000 minutes in a year, these top 20 stories took up only about 17 percent of those minutes. Bring on the fluff.