Breaking News Alerts Keep Public Posted on Trivia and Trump
Xenia Gonikberg
Much like the front page, breaking-news newsletters demonstrate which stories news outlets think deserve the most attention. It's important real estate: By pushing these stories to readers, they influence the way we think about the world, even what in the world we should be thinking about. Even if readers don't click through, just seeing the headlines can shape our perceptions. And, as a new FAIR study has found, those headlines often feed into predictable patterns that parrot official narratives, and prioritize clicks over well-informed citizens.
Outlets like the New York Times promise to send readers alerts about "important news."
Most major outlets produce a variety of email newsletters for readers, which have increasingly broad reach. Subscription numbers are generally not made public, but the New York Times' top newsletter, the Morning, reportedly has over 5 million readers daily, and CNN advertises over 1 million total newsletter subscribers.
To see what kinds of stories outlets present to readers as urgently important, FAIR studied four national outlets that offer unpaywalled breaking news email alerts over the course of two months. We subscribed to alerts from the New York Times, USA Today, CNN and Fox News from April 1 to May 31, 2024, and recorded each alert sent. These outlets advertised that subscribers would receive “24/7 alerts” as the “biggest” and most “important” stories to “stay on top of the news.”
We excluded the occasional roundups of top stories, as these were outside the “breaking news” format. The Times and USA Today periodically offered op-eds as breaking news alerts, and we did include these. FAIR recorded 630 alerts during the study period.
We coded each alert by topic (National Politics, International Politics, Business/Economy, Crime, Entertainment, Sports, Health, Science, Disaster, Personal Advice, Miscellaneous) and subtopic (e.g., Gaza Protests, Abortion Rights, Foreign Aid Bill). Seventy-five alerts were assigned to more than one topic; for instance, a story about the trial of a celebrity might be coded as both Crime and Entertainment.
National politics dominates
Trump's hush money trial, with its titillating details, was the subject of numerous breaking news alerts (New York Times, 5/7/24).
The outlets put out alerts with varying frequency—USA Today put out the most (224, or almost four per day) and CNN the fewest (83)—but National Politics stories dominated across all outlets, making up 274 (43%) of 630 total alerts. Within these stories, Donald Trump figured prominently, referenced in 121 alerts (44% of all National Politics stories). Eighty-eight of these, or 73% of the total stories about Trump, were about his trials—predominately his criminal trial in Manhattan, which ran through all but the first two weeks of the study period.
The Times, with 207 alerts sent out overall, devoted the highest percentage of its National Politics alerts (79) to Trump's legal woes (39%), while Fox, with 116 alerts sent out, afforded them 17 articles of 63 National Politics stories—the smallest percentage of the four outlets (27%). Twice—the day Stormy Daniels testified (5/7/24) and the day the jury announced its guilty verdict (5/30/24)—the Times sent three trial-related alerts to its subscribers over the course of the day.
President Joe Biden received far less attention in National Politics stories; he was referenced in 35, or 13% of them. Fifteen of these stories were about the election, of which only two (USA Today, 5/28/24; Fox News, 5/1/24) did not also mention Trump.
Gaza, at home and abroad
After the Trump trials, the top National Politics topics included the university campus protests for Gaza (41), abortion rights (16) and the foreign aid bill (6). (We coded stories about abortion into the Health category as well.)
Twenty-six (61%) of the 41 alerts about campus Gaza protests came from Fox News, accounting for 22% of all Fox alerts across categories, making it the outlet's single most frequent alert topic. On seven days between April 17 and May 3, Fox sent multiple alerts about the protests; its fixation peaked on April 30, when the network sent five such alerts in a single day.
Fox’s encampment alert subject lines consistently referred to protesters as "agitators," calling them "anti-Israel" and even "antisemitic" (4/30/24). (The New York Times called them "pro-Palestinian protests," and USA Today simply referred to them as "protests.") “Columbia University, Anti-Israel Agitators Fail to Reach Agreement as Unrest Continues” read a typical Fox subject line (4/29/24). “Facilities Worker Says Anti-Israel Columbia University Agitators ‘Held Me Hostage’" read another the next day (4/30/24).
The only Fox News alert (4/26/24) for an international issue other than Gaza was about King Charles' health.
There were many other Gaza protests occurring around the country during the study period (Democracy Now!, 4/18/24, 4/24/24, 5/22/24, 5/30/24, 5/31/24), yet only one alert (Fox News, 4/9/24) mentioned any besides those on college campuses.
The second-most prevalent news category was International Politics, which had 97 alerts (15% of all). Sixty-three of these (65%) pertained to the ongoing Gaza crisis (not including the campus Gaza protests, which were coded as National Politics). Iran was sometimes mentioned in Gaza-related alerts, but it was also featured in eight unrelated alerts (8%) concerning the helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Other recurring topics included Ukraine and the Ukraine War (6%), the shooting of the Slovakian president (5%), British elections (3%), China (3%) and Julian Assange (2%).
Curiously, while Fox advertises its breaking news alerts as keeping subscribers "in the know on the most important moments around the world," it only produced seven alerts on international issues—six of them on the Gaza crisis. (The other article discussed King Charles’ return to royal duties after his cancer diagnosis.) That's just one more alert on Gaza during the entire study period than Fox put out on its peak day of breaking news coverage of the encampments. At the other three outlets, International Politics stories were the second most frequent alerts.
Climate crisis not breaking news
This CNN story (5/7/24) about climate change breaking heat records was not deemed urgent enough to qualify as breaking news.
It's impossible to argue that the climate crisis isn't an ongoing urgent news story. Yet the Science/Environment category had the fewest number of alerts, at 24, making up just 4% of alerts tracked. And only seven (1%) of the subject lines that appeared in our inbox referred or even alluded to climate-related topics.
During the study period, there were multiple major climate crisis stories that CNN, USA Today and the Times (but not Fox) reporters covered—but, for the most part, the outlets chose not to include these stories in their breaking news alerts.
It's perhaps unsurprising that a right-wing outlet like Fox put out no alerts about climate change; its lone science story (4/8/24) was about the April solar eclipse. But CNN and the New York Times did only marginally better. CNN sent alerts for two Science stories, only one of which (4/15/24) was about the climate crisis: "Ocean Heat Is Driving a Global Coral Bleaching Event, and It Could Be the Worst on Record."
At the same time, CNN's website reported on extreme ocean temperatures causing mass marine mortalities (CNN, 4/21/24), extreme heat causing health emergencies (CNN, 4/18/24) and April’s record-breaking heat (CNN, 5/7/24), among other climate change–related topics. On the days that these stories were published, however, CNN only sent out National Politics alerts, or simply no alerts at all.
One of the eight Science stories that the Times pushed was directly about the climate crisis, a story (5/13/24) about federal regulations impacting renewable energy (which we also coded as National Politics). Another Science article (7/3/24) that was not primarily about the climate crisis did mention its role in increasing turbulence experienced on airplane flights.
The Times does offer a paywalled newsletter for stories about climate, called Climate Forward. But they also have a free newsletter called On Politics, offering election-related news alerts—and that didn't stop them from promoting eight articles directly related to the 2024 presidential election as breaking news.
In its online and print editions, the Times reported plenty of stories related to the climate crisis—but, as at CNN, they simply didn't deem them important enough to send as breaking news alerts. On April 10, the Times published a story about ocean heat shattering records, and on April 15 it covered the coral bleaching event. Neither were sent as alerts.
The New York Times found mattress reviews more urgent than climate change.
On May 28, the Times published a piece headlined “Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year”; that story wasn't deemed “important news” that day by the Times’ breaking news alert team, but the “Best Mattresses of 2024” was.
All the outlets studied also failed to send out stories about major flooding disasters in Brazil, Afghanistan and Indonesia (Democracy Now!, 5/13/24, 5/14/24), or about the major heat waves in South Asia that killed hundreds of people (Democracy Now!, 5/28/24; CBS News, 5/15/24). All of these crises are major examples of how climate change is affecting people around the world in drastic ways.
USA Today did best on climate, sending out 13 alerts under the Science/Environment category; four of them discussed climate change, including topics such as carbon emissions and pollution. That's still less than 2% of the paper’s alerts during the two-month period.
Corporate outlets have long been more than willing to leave climate change out of their stories about weather phenomenons and natural disasters around the world (FAIR.org, 9/20/18, 7/18/23, 6/28/24).
According to data published by the Pew Research Center in August 2023, 54% of Americans view climate change as a major threat. According to data collected by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication up until the fall of 2023, 64% of the nation is worried about global warming, 58% believe global warming is already harming people in the US, and 70% think that global warming will harm future generations.
If more than half of the public views global warming and climate change as an urgent issue, why do these major publications not treat it as one?
Crime, entertainment over economy
Many Crime alerts involved celebrities, like one for this Fox News story (4/15/24) about Alec Baldwin.
Although news media frequently report that the economy is “voters’ top concern,” leading into the 2024 election FAIR identified only 40 news alerts as belonging to the Business/Economy beat—6% of all.
Fox and CNN suggested to alert subscribers that Crime stories were more than twice as important, making up 21% of Fox's alerts and 19% of CNN's. (USA Today and the Times only devoted 7% and 4% of their alerts to crime, respectively.) The violent crime rate has actually gone down 26% (and the property crime rate 19%) since President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, according to the New York Times (7/24/24), but media (including the Times) still focus heavily on the topic (FAIR.org, 7/25/24).
Mass shootings made up 21% of Crime alerts (13) across all outlets, which is not surprising, considering there have already been 348 mass shootings in 2024.
Celebrity crimes made up a large portion of Crime alerts across all outlets, at 25 (40%) out of 62. Many of these stories were about Alec Baldwin (5), OJ Simpson (5) and Scottie Scheffler (5).
Fox’s Crime alerts featured headlines meant to catch a reader’s attention—but not provide a lot of information. Take the May 17 news alert from Fox, “Pelosi Hammer Attacker Learns Fate During Sentencing,” for example. Why not include what the sentence was—30 years in prison—in the alert itself?
On April 15, when three out of four alerts sent out by Fox were about Crime (the fourth was a story about Trump’s hush money trial, coded as National Politics), one was headlined “Search for Kansas Women Takes a Turn as Spokeswoman for Investigators Gives Update.” The “turn” was an announcement that officials had given up hope of finding the missing women alive.
For its part, the New York Times gave its readers more Entertainment alerts (18) than Economy alerts (14), pushing out 46% of all Entertainment stories tracked in the study. The paper also put out the highest number of Personal Advice (81% of all) and Miscellaneous stories (72%). The Times and USA Today were the only outlets to send out Personal Advice stories as breaking news alerts, such as “The Six Best White Sneakers” (New York Times, 5/15/24) and “Being a Bridesmaid Can Be Expensive. Should You Say Yes or No?” (USA Today, 5/5/24).
A few New York Times Personal Advice stories (5/15/24, 5/28/24, 5/30/24) were from Wirecutter, the product-review website the Times bought in 2016. The website states at the top of each article that “when you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.” (This process is explained in a bit more depth here.) In the Times’ annual report, revenue made from Wirecutter commissions is listed as part of "Other Businesses," a category that made the Times $265 million in 2023. These Wirecutter stories are not urgent news stories—but they do help the Times make a profit off its readers (FAIR.org, 6/17/21).
Questionable urgency
Stop the presses! The New York Times (4/22/24) reports that some songs on Taylor Swift's latest album "sounded a whole lot like others she has already put out."
The New York Times and USA Today sometimes considered op-eds newsy enough to dedicate an entire alert to, in addition to their regular “breaking news.” An op-ed about Gmail’s 20th anniversary warranted an alert, just like the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did. An op-ed on the dangers of sexual choking got the same weight as the news of the ICC preparing arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders. And in both instances, alerts were pushed on the same day within hours of each other.
The Times also published the most Health stories (21) about seemingly random (rather than breaking news) topics, such as whether oats and apple cider vinegar can really help you lose weight, why we age and tips for a better sex life. (Many of these Health stories were dually coded into Personal Advice.) These types of stories may have surprised readers who subscribed in order to, as the Times advertises, “get informed as important news breaks around the world.”
Times alerts of questionable urgency were often sent out with no apparent rhyme or reason, in the midst of other, more obviously newsworthy alerts. For example, on April 24, the Times sent out alerts about abortion laws in Arizona and Idaho, and the US secretly sending long-range missiles to Ukraine—along with a story headlined “Has Taylor Swift Fatigue Finally Set In?”
The next day, April 25, the Times pushed a story called “‘Eldest Daughter Syndrome’ and the Science of Birth Order” at 8:37 am, and then another email listed as “The U.S. economy grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter, a sharply slower pace than late last year.” just six minutes later. The article about “eldest daughter syndrome” was actually published by the Times ten days earlier, making it clear that it wasn't exactly "breaking" news.
Many of the Times’ stories we coded as "Miscellaneous" had obvious clickbait headlines, like “A Hiker Was Lost in the Woods. Snow Was Falling. Time Was Running Out” (4/30/24) and “These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement” (5/8/24). The latter was linked to the New York Times Magazine, the Times' weekly Sunday magazine that highlights interviews, commentaries, features and longer-length articles—again, not urgent news.
On May 27, when over 2,000 people died in Papua New Guinea, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the tent massacre in Rafah, the Times thought it reasonable to also send alerts about Manhattanhenge, nude modeling and a celebrity obituary that linked to its recently-acquired sports news site, the Athletic. As we’ve seen before (FAIR.org, 6/7/24), the Times enjoys focusing on trending and glamorous topics.
These media outlets offer newsletters that promise comprehensive news alerts about important breaking stories occurring everywhere. After tallying the topics covered, we can confidently state that that's not what subscribers are getting.
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