2005 Annual Report - Network TV Audience

To get a sense of the challenges and opportunities, it makes sense to look at a breakdown of who is watching - the demographics of nightly news.

The most worrisome demographic, of course, is age.

Most news consumption skews older, but as we observed last year, nightly news, thanks in part to its early-evening timeslot, skews the oldest.

What is notable heading into 2005 is that the audiences have become ever so slightly younger.

The median age of the viewer of the Big Three still sits at about 60 years. In the latest data available, however, as of December 2004, two of the three networks, CBS and NBC, saw their audiences get younger. ABC did not.

Median Age of Nightly News Viewers

2002, 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: MagnaGlobal USA, ’’Daypart Briefings,’’ December 15, 2004

The numbers reflect another phenomenon as well. As older people, who make up the most loyal part of the network audience and who are at home when the newscasts come on, live longer, the average age moves further upward.

The nightly network news audience is older than that of cable. According to survey data on media consumption from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, cable audiences actually exceed those of network among people under 50. Network audiences overtake cable audiences in the older age group.

Network and Cable Viewership, by Age

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Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "Pew Research Center Biennial Media Consumption Survey," June 8, 2004.

Yet beyond age, demographics might be considered one of the surprising strengths of the nightly newscasts.

Let's look first at one demographic people usually ignore, political ideology. Some critics, particularly on the right, have long argued that network news tilted to the political left. Dan Rather in particular has been the focus of that charge. In the 1980s, Senator Jesse Helms urged conservatives to buy up CBS stock to position themselves as Dan Rather's new bosses. Fifteen years later, the former CBS correspondent Bernie Goldberg's book about his experience at CBS, called "Bias," hit bestseller lists. Last year, many of the Web sites that tore apart 60 Minutes' (Wednesday) flawed segment on President Bush's National Guard service focused on a presumed anti-Republican political bias at CBS.⁷

Rather was not the only network personality to be accursed of having an unspoken political axe to grind. Peter Jennings has also been accused of having a liberal slant at times over the years, as did ABC News's political director, Mark Halperin, in 2004 for an internal memo suggesting that Bush's political distortions in the campaign were more egregious than Kerry's.

Given all that, there are some striking surprises in the numbers. Polling data from the Pew Research Center in 2004 broke down the audiences of almost all major media outlets in the country by party affiliation and political ideology.

The numbers show that network news audiences may come closer to reflecting the general population than those of any other news source in the country.

Over all, according to Pew data, network nightly news audiences are 27% Republican, 39% Democratic, and 27% Independent.⁸ Those breakdowns barely deviate from the population at large. The number of Republican-leaning viewers is an exact match to the population. The number of Democratic-leaning viewers is three percentage points higher.⁹

The only other media source that comes even close to matching the population over all is the Weather Channel. Network news enjoys a politically diverse audience, a fact that runs contrary to the notion that Americans are seeking out news outlets that simply reinforce their political ideology. It may also reflect the fact, as content analysis shows, that the network newscasts are also uniquely adept among TV news shows at representing diverse viewpoints.