2005 Annual Report - Cable TV Public Attitudes

According to survey data, the public now considers cable news about as credible as the broadcast network news divisions.

That, however, may be an illusory compliment. For the closing of the gap was almost entirely due to viewers' losing faith in network news rather than gaining more confidence in the offerings of cable.

Cable News Believability

1985 to 2004

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Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "News Audiences Increasingly Politicized," June 8, 2004

Of the three channels, CNN still stands out as the most believable, in public perception. It has enjoyed that position even as Fox News has passed it in ratings. But for the last two years, CNN has lost believability, as has MSNBC, while Fox has improved slightly. This has implications both for CNN's reputation and for its economic future.

According to data from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, CNN's believability fell three percentage points from 2002 to 2004 - 29% of Americans gave it the highest rating, versus 32% in 2002.

The downward trend began after 1993, when 41% of Americans gave the channel the highest believability rating - the highest percentage ever achieved by any outlet in Pew Research Center's data going back to 1985.

Since then, CNN's believability rating has dropped 12 percentage points. The decline is even more distressing to the network because before 1993 its credibility was climbing quickly.

While this is a sign that the opinion of the general public is changing, the trend also has economic implications. When CNN was established in 1980, some derided it as "Chicken Noodle News." According to survey work conducted in 1985, CNN was considered less credible than any of the broadcast networks, with only 20% of all Americans giving it the highest believability rating (the networks, by contrast, were given the highest ratings by 30% to 32% of the population). At the time, half of Americans said they didn't even know enough about CNN to rate its believability.

By 1989, it was already considered the most credible news outlet, with 33% of all Americans rating it highest. (The percentage saying they didn't know enough about CNN to rate it had dropped to 24%.) The Gulf War only cemented its reputation. CNN became the network that provided the most vivid pictures from inside Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, and the only network covering the conflict around the clock. Viewership peaked at 5.4 million viewers on January 17, 1991.¹

CNN's high believability rating is one of the clearest metrics of the high-quality "branding" that has kept Fox from matching it in revenue. CNN is still considered the most credible cable network, and is also considered more credible than any other news source with the exception of 60 Minutes, which is seen as equally credible. Figuring out what can be done to shore up its reputation for credibility, then, is probably critical to CNN's ability to hold off the Fox challenge. If CNN cannot diagnose and address this problem and keep its credibility from falling further, it could mean it will suffer in the future as advertisers decide t it can no longer be considered the "gold standard" of cable news.

Between 2002 and 2004 MSNBC's believability also dropped, from 21% to 18%. Fox News's believability rose slightly, with 21% of Americans giving it the highest score for believability compared with 19% in 2002. What is notable is that the three cable news channels are considered about as trustworthy as the three broadcast news divisions. (A discussion of the relationship between credibility and partisanship is below.)