Network TV Audience Trends

In its first year, 2004, this report discussed in detail the various factors affecting nightly news viewership. In brief, those factors include longer work days, expanded commutes, growing competition from new technology, the end of the cold war, cutbacks in network news content, and generational lack of interest in the news.

What is it, then, that does bring viewers to the Big Three network newscasts? In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (conducted in association with the Project for Excellence in Journalism) people with a favorable view of network television news were asked in follow-up interviews to explain what they felt was best about it. Respondents agreed “that these programs do a good job of summarizing news, and provide a considerable range and breadth of coverage in an understandable fashion.”2 Taking that a step further, the convenience of a 30-minute news wrap-up in the evening or first thing in the morning suited those viewers.

But the same survey found that more people, roughly a quarter of respondents, said they got their news on national and international issues from cable outlets like CNN (24%) or Fox News’s cable channel (22%). The Big Three broadcast networks were cited to a lesser degree: ABC (16%), NBC (16%) and CBS (12%).3 Cable viewers said what they liked was the up-to-the-minute news that, in addition, could be tuned in anytime.

The challenge for network evening news producers ever since 1980 with the start of CNN has been how to match whatever experience, brand and story-telling strengths they have with the constant availability and rapid response of cable. After 25 years, the network overall nightly news audience still accounts for the largest number of people watching news at any one time. The notion that these programs are dying is clearly exaggerated. But the continuous decline in audience makes the size of the audience by itself less reassuring.

Heading into 2006, however, the Big Three network news organizations may never have been in a better position to re-conceptualize the evening broadcasts than they were in 2005. Each had anchor chairs to fill, with the stepping aside of Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and the death of Jennings at age 67. Each had held his anchor chair since the 1980s, and the programs were inevitably identified, despite whatever changes were made, with figures who were older, male and white and delivered the news in a traditional, authoritative anchoring style. Yet the continuing presence of the old anchors probably inhibited innovation. Changes were minor, not revolutionary (Brokaw stood rather than sat). Now, with new faces at NBC and ABC and new ones coming at CBS, there was at least the opportunity for a greater pace of change and higher level of innovation. Network news was standing at the edge of a new-media revolution where information is traded online, over cell phones, by bloggers and even vloggers (the v is for video). Probably the most interesting question moving into 2006 was whether new faces in the anchor chairs signaled a new kind of network news, in particular one where the TV set is not the only serious focus. That certainly was part of what the networks were saying publicly.

At the same time, the sheer size of the network evening news audience always seemed to make the networks leery of risk. Jim Murphy, executive producer of the CBS Evening News for six years until being replaced at the end of 2005, put it this way: “The winners will be the ones who stick to smart plans and the right people. The losers will be the ones who think they are being bold or daring but sacrifice their traditional audiences.”4

Evening News Share

1993-2005, November to November

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

* Ratings taken for month of November.