Fox's Leadership | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

March 15, 2005

How are the three major cable news networks faring individually?

In 2004 Fox remained cable news's undisputed leader in ratings, or the number of people watching at any given time.

By one way of measuring, looking at total viewership throughout the day, Rupert Murdoch's news network generally commanded around 55% of cable news audience during the year, according to Nielsen Media Research's measurement of "total day" viewing. This figure measures the average number of viewers over the course of an entire day -- 24 hours. CNN is second in total-day viewership, with roughly 30%; MSNBC captures the remaining 15 percent.

More commonly, networks and advertisers look at ratings for different dayparts.¹

Measuring ratings this way, Fox News is still the leader, and is still growing. Its median audience in prime time rose by 10% in 2004 over the year before, to 1.47 million viewers from 1.34 million. In daytime, its median also increased, by 11%, to 856,000 in 2004, up from 770,000 in 2003.

CNN remained in second place, with 815,000 median prime-time viewers, a drop of 2% from 832,000 in 2003. Its median daytime viewership, meanwhile, was 482,000, a drop of 4% from 2003.

MSNBC, still in third place, had median viewership of 341,000 in prime time, though that represented a healthy increase of 19% over the 287,000 viewers it had in 2003. Its median daytime viewership, meanwhile, barely changed, from 222,000 in 2003 to 224,000 in 2004.

Will Fox be able to sustain its growth past the election season?

From now on, to grow, Fox News must focus more on winning over viewers who already had access to it but heretofore chose not to watch, or not to watch as much. In that context, it is striking that the rate of growth in median audience has been declining since 2001. In that year, Fox's median audience grew 113% compared with 2000. In 2002, the year it overtook CNN, the median Fox News audience grew 73%.

Since then, median audience growth has been much smaller: in 2003, the year of the war in Iraq, the median audience grew 18%. In 2004, as noted, the increase was just 10%.

Nonetheless, Fox's audience trends are better than those of its rivals.