A standing series about the desk’s own record of television: 99 days, 5 channels, 8,500,625 spoken lines, 364,048 on-screen banners. The subject is never the news event — it is stale by definition. The subject is the measurement: what the medium put on the screen, what it left out, and what can be counted.
Every figure carries its query. Corrections are diffs, published.
Of 2,057 stories three channels covered, MSNOW sat out 55.8% and BBC 56.9%, against Fox 20.0% and CNN 12.5% — and MSNOW has the most captured airtime, so this is format, not capture.
MSNOW averages 8m33s per story segment with 12.8% under a minute; BBC averages 2m36s with 56.3% under a minute. Same airtime, different units.
364,048 on-screen banners, 57% of them impossible to check against the audio, and among the rest only 6.2% mostly spoken. The lower third is a second editorial layer, not a caption.
