2004 Annual Report - Network TV Audience

It is difficult, as mentioned before, to apportion precisely where network news audiences are going to, given the variety of changes that have occurred in technology, competition and lifestyle, plus the content of network news.

But since the steepest decline in network viewership dates back to the 1980s and the advent of cable, it makes sense to look closer at the impact of that medium.

Network executives are quick to point out that, even while ratings have dropped, more than 29 million people still watch the networks news on average in the evening, and just under 15 million still tune in for the morning shows. Those numbers far outstrip any cable network news program at anytime, even when the cable networks' highest-rated programs are airing. There are 2 million people watching the average cable news program in prime time, but that figure hardly matches the losses in network viewership in nightly news.³³

Ratings and viewership, as cable executives are quick to note, are not the whole story. Ratings tell only how many people are watching a given program. They do not add up how many different people cumulatively turn to cable or network news over the course of a day, a number analogous to unique visitors in the online world. This, cable professionals say, is important in understanding the appeal of their medium.

To more fully assess the flight of network news audiences, one must turn to survey data. These suggest that a more significant part of networks' loss has been cable's gain. Contrary to the ratings data, according to studies by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, more people now prefer cable news than network news as their source for national and international news. As far back as 1993, when CNN was the sole cable news channel, the public was as likely to turn to cable as network. By 1999, Pew data showed cable with a 13-point advantage over network. In March of 2003, the gap had widened to 27 percentage points.³⁴

Where People Go for National/International News, Network vs. Cable

Do you get most of your news about national and international issues from network TV news, from local TV news, or from cable news networks such as CNN, MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel?

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press unpublished data, www.people-press.org

* Dates not to scale. Based on survey responses. Respondents allowed to give two answers.

Why? Is there something in the nature of cable news content that people prefer over network news content? Or is this preference for cable a function of availability?

Here the superior ratings of network news programming over cable become relevant. In head to head competition, when network news and cable news are on at the same time, network news prevails, and by a large margin. This suggests that people apparently do not prefer the way cable does the news; they prefer its instant availability. The age of appointment news - when people would structure their time to wait for a certain program to come on - has faded. People now want their news, or their kids' programming, or their cooking show, when they want it.

One question is what the networks will do when the current evening anchors retire. Will audiences for evening news shrink further when the familiar faces are gone? If so, will the networks decide to abdicate covering news nearly entirely, having skeletal crews that can offer just enough traditional hard news to fill a morning show or an occasional prime time magazine segment, but not purport to cover the world in any comprehensive way? Or will they seek newer ways of offering news, perhaps to a younger audience? Some say NBC has already taken steps in this direction with CNBC and MSNBC.

Researcher Andrew Tyndall says, "NBC has become the cross-medium multi-demographic news division for the entire conglomerate. It was a great institutional failure of ABC News and CBS News not to have replicated what NBC News has done. If, for example, CBS News was responsible for news for children (on Nickelodeon), for youth (on MTV), for African-Americans (on BET), for men (on Spike), on the radio (Infinity) and so on, it would once again address the mass market that Cronkite once did and put the Tiffany in Viacom, as it were. That potential audience for CBS News is already waiting in Viacom's distribution system, but the news division just does not have the vision or the corporate ambition to revive its once-famous name."³⁵