• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, January 6, 2010

 We all know the facts -- or so we think. No matter. Contemporary TV and media wisdom says heavy analysis is still what U.S. media consumers are looking for, whether on traditional media or new digital platforms.

Now PBS' "Nightly Business Report" is another in a series of media content providers pushing to do more analysis. A PBS executive explains that stock market quotes have been "commoditized" -- you can get them anywhere.

So this TV show joins a slew of other content providers of general news (Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and others), sports (ESPN, many times over), as well as billions of pages on the Internet on about a billion different topics.

Publicly, TV executives will say general news, business news, and sports news analysis gives viewers what they are looking for -- perspective.

But how much analysis do we need? A bigger question:  Are other "news" or "facts" being commoditized?

More than a few experts believe there aren't enough facts --meaning original journalism and reporting -- about issues such as health care, terrorism and the economy.

MSNBC said as much after it made a deal to buy digital company breakingnews.com. Charlie Tillinghast, president of the MSNBC Digital Network, said: "Hard and fast breaking news is currently an underserved market."

Business news is a different animal, say PBS executives. That's because there's so much data to crunch. So then, is the real commodity all that general news analysis -- as well as sports news, which ESPN, for one, builds a lot of its backbone daytime programming efforts on? Yet like stock quotes, you seemingly can get sports news anywhere.

Of course, analysis is not a dispassionate activity -- and that's the real lure for TV executives. Screaming pundits mean big "drama" in TVland, no matter if it's about terrorism, the recession, or a fake kick by the Washington Redskins (in a recent game where the nation's capital team was getting crushed by the New York Giants).

Analysis sounds like serious stuff, the lure hopefully further discourse. But we shouldn't forget to find a place for the more serious, if possibly boring, facts on which everything is built. A better sales approach?  Use that now-retro journalistic term: hard news.