Bad Company III examined media coverage during broadcast evening news shows and two cable news programs looking specifically for portrayals of American businessmen and women during 2006.

     BMI researchers examined all stories appearing from Jan. 1, 2006, to Dec. 31, 2006, on the "CBS Evening News," "NBC Nightly News," ABC’s "World News Tonight" (which became "World News with Charles Gibson"), CNN’s "Lou Dobbs Tonight" and Fox News Channel’s "Your World with Neil Cavuto."

     In order to include cable news in the study, two comparable hour-long evening shows were selected. BMI chose Fox’s Monday through Friday business program, "Your World with Neil Cavuto," which includes news reports and interviews. Its closest CNN counterpart, "Lou Dobbs Tonight," focuses mostly on economic and business issues such as outsourcing, a "war on the middle class," and trade.

     BMI researchers watched all evening newscasts that were available from the East Coast feed at the Media Research Center and obtained newscasts that did not air on the East Coast through transcripts and video found on the Lexis-Nexis service and private archiving services.

     BMI found 1,082 mentions and appearances of businessmen and women in the 12-month time frame, comprised of 334 on CBS; 262 on NBC; 193 on ABC, 80 on CNN’s "Lou Dobbs Tonight" and 213 on Fox’s "Your World with Neil Cavuto."

     For a man or woman to qualify as a businessman, he or she had to be a decision-maker for the business or represent an industry as a part of an association of businesses. That included CEOs, other executives, managers and small business owners. Researchers also tallied whether the stories included big businesses, small businesses or whether the size of the business was unknown.

     Each businessman or woman was coded to record how he/she was portrayed in the news story. Examples included: on defense; neutral; launching or touting a product or service; philanthropist; or criminal. For a businessman to be counted as a criminal, it was necessary that the report include some investigation by law enforcement, court proceedings or the results thereof. If a businessman was to be counted as touting a product or service, the product or service was mentioned in the broadcast.

     Sometimes a businessman was portrayed in more than one way. For the purpose of the study, each portrayal was logged. Many of the statistics cited in the study were calculated from the total of positive and negative portrayals, which was 848 for all five shows. Of those, 57 percent (481) were negative, and 43 percent (367) were positive.

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