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Under Pelley's anchorship, CBS has turned into the leader among the three newscasts in four major categories of hard journalism (all data are for the June through September period):
1.Foreign Policy: CBS has spent much more time on foreign policy in general (136 min v ABC 87, NBC 106), in particular on the war in Afghanistan (77 min v ABC 32, CBS 38). Anchor Pelley has visited there twice, most recently to mark the tenth anniversary of the start of the war this week, and CBS, alone of the three newscasts, has a correspondent stationed permanently in Kabul: Mandy Clark.
2.The Stalling Economy: again CBS not only spent more time on economic stories in general (486 min v ABC 306, CBS 295), led by veteran business correspondent Anthony Mason, but it has also zeroed in on three specific areas of economic distress. CBS has spent most time on unemployment (70 min v ABC 43, NBC 46), on the housing crisis, both foreclosures and sagging construction and sales (56 min v ABC 8, NBC 3), and on that cluster of stories concerning poverty-hunger-homelessness (28 min v ABC 13, NBC 19).
3.Domestic Politics: with Nancy Cordes on Capitol Hill and the newly-arrived Norah O'Donnell replacing Chip Reid at the White House (both O'Donnell and Reid were once part of Tim Russert's DC Bureau at NBC), CBS led the way this summer in covering inside-the-Beltway politics (374 min v ABC 282, NBC 327), a leading role habitually taken by NBC, when Russert was alive. The summer's leading political story was the Debt Ceiling debate, which CBS covered most heavily (143 min v ABC 73, NBC 89), by far. It was certainly in its sweet spot, being both an economic and a political story. So far CBS has not made a similar effort to dominate the early stages of Campaign 2012 (66 min v ABC 77, NBC 80), where Jan Crawford is its lead correspondent.
4.Major Developments: CBS devoted almost exactly half of its newshole to the Top Thirty (833 min v 851 on all other stories) most heavily covered stories (ranked by total time devoted to each on all three newscasts combined) of the past four months. Compare that with NBC (729 min on the Top Thirty v 970 on all others) and, most astonishingly, ABC's ratio (581 min v 1053). Those 30 were topped by the Debt Ceiling (305 min) inside-the-Beltway, Hurricane Irene (178 min) along the eastern seaboard, unemployment (159 min) nationwide, and Afghanistan (147 min) and Libya (146 min) overseas.
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