2004 Annual Report - Cable TV Audience

War was good for cable. It was especially good for Fox News. But it didn't last.

The big winner was Fox News, which managed to increase its lead over CNN. For the week of March 17-23, the first week of the war, it managed to capture 4.1 million households during prime time, making it the most-watched of any cable network, far outpacing CNN, with 3.2 million households. MSNBC was farther back with 1.6 million households.¹⁹

Sharp spikes are typical of what CNN had seen throughout its history, when viewership rose and fell drastically with events, and most spikes upward were brief. The first Gulf War, the Challenger Disaster and Baby Jessica falling into a well are examples of the kinds of stories that typically caused surges in cable viewers. Sometimes the valleys afterward would get lower than before, suggesting a kind of cable news fatigue.

Three events in recent years suggest the "barometer" role may have passed from CNN to Fox News. In other words, Fox News may have become the channel that viewers associate with breaking news, although this does not lead to a lasting loyalty.

On September 11, CNN was indisputably the cable news outlet viewers turned to most. It received nine times its average viewership in the first four days following the terrorist attacks, while the other two channels received five times as many viewers.²⁰ By February 2003, when the Columbia space shuttle was destroyed, Fox News had been leading in the week-by-week Nielsens for a year, but CNN drew more viewers on that day (CNN had 3.21 million viewers and Fox News had 3.03 million while MSNBC had 1.23 million).²¹

But when the war in Iraq began, more viewers turned to Fox News (7.9 million viewers on the first night of the war, versus 7.3 million for CNN, and 4 million for MSNBC; see chart).²² When the news of Saddam's capture broke on December 14, 2003, Fox News claimed another breaking news victory, with a 2.3 million viewer average for the day, trumping CNN's 2 million average and MSNBC's 677,000.²³

Fox News may have become a network for patriotic events and a good network for war, but not necessarily for messy aftermaths or for breaking news. During the Columbia shuttle disaster, Fox News was caught using footage from both an ABC station with a contract to provide footage to CNN and an NBC-owned station in Dallas, leading an NBC spokeswoman to observe that, "If they [Fox News] hadn't used our video and CNN's, they would have had nothing."²⁴ The next time a breaking news event happens, the burden will be on Fox News to show it can use its own resources to deliver the story as quickly and accurately as possible.

Before the war began, there had been speculation that CNN, with its greater numbers and technology, would become the first choice for viewers, mimicking its brief success during the 1991 Gulf War. As one commentary put it, "Any shortcoming on that front will be magnified greatly. It's not fair, perhaps, but impressions right at this moment are paramount, and CNN must give the impression that it is back on track."²⁵

MSNBC had hopes the war would be a fresh start for it, too. General Electric executives were quite open about that with reporters, and the news channel poured resources into the effort.

Yet Fox News' surer sense of branding seemed to win out, at least temporarily. All three of the cable channels wrapped themselves in the flag after September 11, the "logo and bunting war" you might call it. But as war broke out, there were more substantive differences. MSNBC and Fox News adopted the Pentagon's name for the war - "Operation Iraqi Freedom" - as the label for their coverage. CNN did not. To some viewers, impressionistically, Fox News appeared even more patriotic, jingoistic or pro-Bush Administration -- depending on how one might describe it -- than the others. As an example, it hired Oliver North, the former Marine colonel and Iran-Contra figure turned conservative talk show host, as an embedded reporter. Its morning show also gained press attention for its patriotic tone. And Fox News got more of the new temporary viewers.

The thinking was that people would sample and perhaps develop new brand loyalty. All three channels went commercial-free during the first phase of the war, and according to one estimate their combined ad revenue loss for the first three weeks of the war was roughly $34 million.²⁶ One CNN executive, interviewed in October 2001, argued in pragmatic terms that going commercial-free (in that case, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks) was in part a tactic for "trying to grab as many people as you can…Then, when you slip back into commercials, the hope is that yours will be the one they stick with."²⁷

Perhaps the fact that all three cable networks followed the same strategy meant that they tended to cancel each other out. Whatever the reason, the gains enjoyed during the war did not last and the exposure of unprecedented number of people to the cable news channels at one time did not abate the two-year decline in audience overall. To put it in perspective, even during the war the total number of households tuned to the three cable news channels, 8.8 million, is not much greater than what NBC's "Nightly News" alone draws on a typical day.