ABC, NBC, and CBS couldn’t find a temperature that was “just right” to fit yesterday’s projections of the upcoming winter months by the Energy Department.
Whether winter was to be warmer or colder, the networks all assured viewers it was going to be bad.
On CBS’s “Evening News,” Katie Couric stated that “the government predicted today that temperatures this winter will generally be above average. Even so, it will cost you more to heat your home.”
But ABC’s “World News with Charles Gibson” led its broadcast with the Energy Information Administration’s report by saying “Tonight, news of a cold wind a coming that promises to have a chilling effect on the American pocketbook,” and continued to sing a different tune than Couric, professing that “the average American homeowner will pay 10 percent more for heating during what will be, generally, a colder winter.”
And NBC? Well, “Nightly News” focused mostly on the “epic” drought, but not without first mentioning predictions by government scientists for “warmer than normal temperatures across much of the South.”
The confusion seems to stem from the EIA’s estimation [2] that “winter in the lower-48 States is forecast to be 4 percent colder compared with last winter but 2 percent warmer than the 30-year average.”
CBS and NBC appear to have found news on the warmer than average calculation to be important while ABC saw the comparison to last year as being the most relevant.
However, Gibson and Couric’s reports did share a common ground.
Both CBS and ABC managed to reference the 22-percent increase in heating oil prices without mentioning that according to the EIA’s report, the number of
The report was difficult for newscasters to decipher, but The Washington Post had little trouble as it easily summarized this morning “Almost all Americans will pay more to heat their homes this winter. Temperatures are expected to be warmer than average but colder than last year.”