2005 Annual Report - Cable TV Audience

The Big Picture
From a distance, people may think 2004 must have been a year of ascendancy for cable news. In September, Fox News earned enormous publicity for attracting more viewers during the last two nights of the Republican convention than any other source, including the broadcast networks. With the exception of the first nights of the Gulf War in 1991, no one could recall another moment when a cable news channel had bettered a broadcast network news program in live head-to-head coverage of a breaking news event. Was it a watershed? Perhaps.

Yet the impression that cable's audience is ever-growing, or that 2004 was cable's greatest year, is mistaken. Indeed, in assessing what is going on in cable audiences, four much more complicated trends stand out.

• Over all, a close look at the numbers suggests that the audience for cable news, after being basically flat for nearly two years, drifted upward in the last two months of the election campaign to help create a slight uptick in cable's audience year to year.

• Fox News, which had been rising steadily since 1996, is still growing, while CNN, its biggest rival, is still declining. But Fox is now growing at a slower rate than before, and CNN's losses appear to be flattening.

• In 2004, there was also growing evidence that the cable news audience was splintering along partisan lines -- particularly for Republicans who have left CNN and migrated to Fox.

• At the same time, new data suggest that the growth potential of cable audiences may have reached its limit, as most of the people who could have access to cable news now have it and have made their consumer choices.

Overall Viewership

Between 1996 and 2002, cable viewership climbed fairly steadily. The usual pattern involved crises engendering growth. During major events, more people than before would gravitate to cable, and afterwards, some portion of them would continue as regular viewers. The peak and valley effect was particularly the case after the 2000 election and then after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Both events boosted what might be called cable's core audience, the group that tended to watch day in and day out.

That growth pattern, as we reported last year, seemed to cease in 2003, even with the war in Iraq. Cable saw a huge audience spike -- one of its biggest ever -- but over time it lost all of it.

What happened in 2004?

For most of the year, cable news viewership fluctuated between roughly two and three million viewers. CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were unable to hold onto the viewers they gained during the Iraq war in 2003 and subsequent major news events such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 and the death of Ronald Reagan in June 2004.

That ceiling on the cable audience held until the party conventions and the election, which bumped viewership to roughly 4 million. The cable channels managed to keep about half of that expanded audience in November, but by December the audience was back at 2.55 million -- slightly higher than the 2.47 million viewers in January 2004, but less than the 2.59 million viewers watching in December 2003, when the capture of Saddam Hussein helped spike viewership.

Prime Time Cable News Viewership

1997 to 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research unpublished data