Hard and Soft News

Overview

News program content is traditionally discussed in terms of whether it is "hard" or "soft" news. The meaning of the distinction is a little fluid, but hard news encompasses news coverage about timely and consequential topics, with a presentation driven by facts, analysis, and in-depth reporting. Soft news focuses on topics that are generally considered more trivial: entertainment, celebrity news, sports, and the umbrella category "lifestyle," as well as human interest stories like a local news profile of a beloved retiring teacher or a family who adopted a rescue dog. The lines between these two areas of news coverage can and often do blur. Some of the best-known stories on the "sports beat" involved months of investigative reporting. In the entertainment world, too, stories include gender and ethnic representation in mass media, the prevalence of sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, and labor issues. Meanwhile, areas such as politics can just as often provide fodder for the softest news coverage, from stories on a first lady's haircut to the president's summer reading list.

Sometimes, rather than distinguishing between two types of news, a distinction will be made between hard and soft media. Hard media here would be the major news outlets and news-driven magazines and television programs (and, increasingly, podcasts), while soft media would include "lifestyle," entertainment, and sports magazines and programs. The line can be blurred here as well: Traditionally soft magazines from Ladies Home Journal to Sports Illustrated to Teen Vogue have taken turns for the harder and more serious, whether for a period of time or permanently, while hard media usually include soft content as well.

The easiest way to make the distinction is to look at the intent. Hard news informs the audience. Soft news entertains. Yet distinctions can be misleading. Sports news has included stories about the organized cover-up of sexual abuse by coaches, the problem of concussions in football and boxing, the link between chronic traumatic encephalopathy sufferers and domestic violence, racism in professional sports, Ibtihaj Muhammad becoming the first Muslim American to wear a hijab while competing in the Olympics, and the question of pay for or profit-sharing by college athletes. The exceptions to these generalizations are important to media literacy, both for consumers and for communications theorists seeking to understand media consumption habits.

Some critics, who use "soft news" as a criticism, paint all news of a given medium as "soft"—usually television, sometimes major weekly magazines—in which case, they are usually accused of being softer than they were in the past. Here, "soft" is being used to indicate not the class of news story but the approach: The implicit argument is that television news is superficial, composed of too many brief stories without in-depth coverage, alternating between different news stories without rhyme or reason. Walter Cronkite, the esteemed CBS News anchor, made this complaint himself, referring to the nightly news as "just the headlines."

A 2004 critique of CNN coverage pointed out that the lead story was about Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl halftime show, followed by a story about a chemical attack on Senator Bill Frist; not only was the second story significantly more newsworthy and serious than the first, but presenting both in succession created a strange leveling effect, as though all news is equally relevant news. While this critique focused specifically on CNN, and specifically at one point in time, it sums up the criticism often leveled at television news coverage—and while that criticism is often couched in terms of a decline in quality, it is one that has been made routinely for as long as television news has been around.

Further Insights

News media have included both hard and soft news for most of their history, for a simple reason: any given media source tends to be a standardized length, whether that refers to the number of pages in a newspaper or magazine, or the number of minutes in a radio or television program. There isn't always enough hard news to fill this space. Even before professional sports leagues were formed and became a regular subject of soft news coverage, newspapers and magazines that were otherwise primarily concerned with hard news would find themselves with space to fill, whether for a lack of hard news content or from a desire to space out hard news pieces with lighter pieces. Newspapers have traditionally carried columns with little to no relationship to "news"—advice columns, household hints, recipes—in addition to soft news coverage like restaurant and entertainment reviews, and non-news content like comic strips (though editorial cartoons might straddle the line between news and non-news, as might topical strips such as Doonesbury).

Television news programs have grown in length over time. Until 1963, weeknight evening news programs were 15 minutes long. CBS was the first to expand the length of its network-supplied news program—then anchored by Walter Cronkite—to 30 minutes, with other networks following soon after. Many local news programs made the same expansion in the 1960s. While several factors fed these expansions—for example, it was beneficial for television programs to fall into standard lengths, which meant making as many of them as possible thirty or sixty minutes—the Vietnam War was one major factor. The war, in which American involvement (using regular combat troops) lasted from roughly 1965 to 1975, provided the national news with regular developments of policy debates, battle developments, the entrance or withdrawal of other countries, and anti-war protests and counterprotests, while providing local and regional news with "local interest" angles, from casualties of local members of the armed forces to local student walk-outs. When the war ended—even as it was winding down—there was a void to fill in these longer news programs. One of the results was the greater frequency of the "human interest" story.

Human interest stories are not new; they were part of the regularly featured content of the New York Sun when it was founded in 1833. As the twentieth century progressed, human interest stories augmented hard news coverage. Stories about a major natural disaster like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 often consisted of a number of interrelated stories: a hard-news just-the-facts presentation of what had happened and where; an interview with a scientist explaining what had happened, or a public official summarizing the official response to the disaster; and a profile of or interview with a victim of the disaster. These profiles put a "human face" on a large story, converting lists of facts and figures into a narrative about how those numbers impacted the life of a real person or family. Such stories were a staple of journalism from the early twentieth century.

The rise of the motion picture industry in Hollywood, which created a new kind of celebrity, contributed to a rise in celebrity profiles, some of which were released as part of the publicity push associated with an actor's latest movie, others of which could be held until the paper needed to fill some space. As with the winding down of the Vietnam War, a similar void was created in the 1990s, specific to cable news. Though CNN first began airing as a 24-hour news channel in 1980, it wasn't until the Gulf War a decade later that it earned appreciable ratings, beating the Big Three broadcast networks thanks to its live on-the-scene coverage of the war by Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett. The war lasted only a few months, but CNN had tasted ratings success, and over time, especially in the following decade, it became less dry and hard-news-driven, spending more time on speculation, spin, and soft news.

One of the terms associated with soft news is "infotainment," a portmanteau of "information" and "entertainment," coined in reference to "infomercial." Although some websites self-identify as infotainment, the term is more often used disparagingly, often as a synonym for the older "junk food news." At the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear in 2010—itself a perfect example of infotainment, as the hosts of two satirical news programs held a rally to discuss the media, amid celebrity guests and musical performances—Jon Stewart took aim at the mainstream media of the day, accusing them of neglecting their mandate to inform the public, instead keeping their focus on conspiracy theories, inconsequential scandals, and sensationalism. This was a full six years before the "fake news" era, but already Stewart found plenty to complain about in television news' increasing tendency to present "both sides" of any given argument and give both perspectives equal weight, regardless of factors such as accuracy or the existence of evidence, without the journalistic interrogation that ought to characterize hard news coverage. Stewart also blamed the news media for manufacturing interest in the audience, placing undue emphasis on certain topics not because there was a public demand for coverage of them but because they were suitable topics for sensationalist narratives that kept ratings high.

Issues

In 2016, Reuters, in conjunction with the University of Oxford, conducted a survey about news preferences among news consumers in different countries. The timing of the survey, by the researchers' own admission, may have impacted results: In the United States, consumers rated political news as the most important, which presumably was affected to no small degree by the dramatic presidential election. Germany and Turkey also rated political news highly, and Germany, Ireland, and Austria rated international news highly. Japan showed the most interested in entertainment and celebrity news; most Western European countries, the least. Generally, Japan and Korea showed the most interest in soft news, with about a third of each country expressing greater interest in it than in hard news, and half the country either preferring it to hard news or showing equivalent interest. Greece, Germany, Spain, and Denmark showed the least interest in soft news, with about 80 percent of each country preferring hard news. The United States showed a strong preference for hard news as well.

While gender differences were found in news interests, they did not fall across hard/soft lines, but rather types of hard and soft news. Men showed more interest in politics, business, and tech news, but also in sports. Women showed more interest in lifestyle and celebrity news, but also in politics, health and education, and environmental news. There was little gender difference in crime and security news, and both men and women rated local news as the most important. These gender differences were largely the same in most countries, though the extent of the difference varied; in Spain, for example, the proportion of women expressing a preference for soft news was only about a quarter higher than the proportion of men. In the United States, Italy, and Japan, twice as many women preferred soft news than did men, even though in Italy and Japan, the overall sentiment toward soft news was more positive. News preferences were also impacted by age: people under 35 are significantly more likely to prefer soft news in most countries. In the United Kingdom, interest does not fall off until age 45, while in the United States and Japan, adolescents express the greatest interest, with each successive age group expressing slightly less enthusiasm until a sharp decline after age 54.

It is important to keep in mind that studies such as Reuters's depend on self-reported information, which while an important source of consumer habits is also famously subject to bias. In countries where soft news is looked down on, or where gender roles are strict, respondents tend to overemphasize their interest in the news they believe they are "supposed" to consume, and to downplay their consumption of unsuitable news. Studies of social media, which is the main or among the main sources of news for many respondents (more so in the United States than in Europe or Japan), have found that soft news stories are linked and clicked much more frequently than hard news stories. There are a variety of reasons why people could be misreporting their soft news consumption: Some may, when consciously inventorying their news consumption for the survey, primarily consider traditional media such as print and television, without considering how many lifestyle or celebrity stories they may have read on Facebook or Twitter. They may not even think of stories linked from social media as "news consumption" as such, even when those links lead to the online presences of traditional media outlets like the Wall Street Journal or The Atlantic.

In the past, it was commonplace for male reporters to cover hard news and for female reporters to cover soft news. This was partly because female reporters were grossly underrepresented in the newsroom. However, by the twenty-first century, this practice had changed. In the 2020s, either male or female reporters could cover both hard and soft news. In many newsrooms, especially large ones, reporters are specialized. For example, a particular reporter might cover mainly local politics.

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