2005 Annual Report - Network TV Audience

A genre that once seemed to embody the future of network television news may fade further from the airwaves in 2005.

The best-known problems concern what is now known as 60 Minutes Wednesday, the weeknight primetime clone of the venerable Sunday program, began 2005 in disarray and in jeopardy.²⁷ The program's executive producer, his second in command, and the broadcast's star producer had been removed, along with a news division vice president, in the wake of an independent report (read the CBS REPORT) criticizing a September 8, 2004 segment about President Bush's National Guard service.

Worse still, the program's ratings began to pale in comparison to the network's highly successful prime-time entertainment schedule. It wasn't that 60 Minutes Wednesday was failing, but rather that the bar had been raised. Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Television, told television writers in early 2005 that "60 Minutes Wednesday has to earn its right to be on the schedule," adding, "Its [ratings] were not particularly wonderful even before the [Bush] story got on the air."²⁸

And by February 2005, ABC's Primetime Live was also reported to be threatened because of declining ratings.

There was a period when news magazines dominated the prime-time landscape. The format was less expensive to produce than the entertainment shows they replaced, and thus not only added to the news divisions' contribution to revenues but could make money with smaller audiences than entertainment programs. Some programs became mini-franchises. Dateline NBC duplicated itself across the week. Now news magazines have been eclipsed in prime time by reality television, a form even cheaper to produce.

One show that people imagined might be facing change, given the retirement of its founding executive producer, Don Hewitt, seemed a picture of relative stability: 60 Minutes, which started its thirty-seventh season in September 2004, has placed in Nielsen's Top 10 television programs twenty-three times and places consistently in Nielsen's weekly Top 20 list.²⁹

Unpublished Nielsen data provided to the Project suggests the original Sunday 60 Minutes remains the leader of prime-time magazines. In a season-to-date report generated on January 26, 2005, the program averaged 15.2 million viewers. Its sister show, 60 Minutes Wednesday, had 8.6 million. An average of the audiences for NBC's Dateline for Friday and Sunday (Dateline, unlike 60 Minutes, does not present itself as two distinct shows) was 8.8 million, followed by ABC's 20/20 (8.6 million), CBS's 48 Hours (7.5 million), and ABC's Primetime Live (6.4 million).

Prime-Time News Magazine Viewership

September 20, 2004 to January 25, 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Unpublished Nielsen Media Research data

*"Primetime Live" data includes an average of Friday and Sunday numbers. Data in the chart do not include numbers for special editions.

Nightline

Nightline, which began in 1979 as "America Held Hostage" during the Iran hostage crisis, ended 2004 facing what some feared would prove a mortal crisis. Two years ago, the network made an ill-fated play for the CBS "Late Night" star David Letterman, promising him the Nightline time slot. Anchor Ted Koppel's current contract ends in 2005, and many insiders suspect that may provide the network with the moment to kill the program, if it wants to.

During 2004 Nightline notched its lowest number of average viewers ever, 3.7 million, a drop from 6.2 million in 1993.³⁰ A Nielsen report in January 2005 put the number for the current season slightly higher, at an average of 3.8 million.

The latest concern about the broadcast became public when the executive producer, Leroy Sievers, announced in September 2004 that he was leaving. In a written announcement, Sievers said "the company has made it clear that it is considering fundamental changes to the format and the direction that the broadcast takes in the future."³¹

A network spokesman, Jeffrey Schneider, in an interview with the Hartford Courant, dismissed the notion that Sievers's departure foreshadowed the end of Nightline or of Koppel as its star. "Ted Koppel is part of our DNA," Schneider said. "He has given 40 years to ABC News, 25 of those leading Nightline, and is as passionate and committed today as when he started."³²

But the Courant also spoke to TV observers who raised a good deal more doubt. "This is a network that is getting its clock cleaned at that time of night," said Deborah Potter of NewsLab, a nonprofit center that focuses on training and research for television and radio newsrooms. "The truth is, Ted's contract is just about up, he makes a lot of money and doesn't work on the show all that much. ABC is looking at this as a way to make more money."³³

After Sievers's announcement, the network announced that Tom Battag, who had left the day-to-day running of Nightline to Sievers after taking over the reins of the Sunday morning program, "This Week," would return to Nightline.

Bettag told USA Today in January 2005 that Nightline's declining numbers reflected a widespread falling off and "splintering" of network news viewership in the face of cable and the Internet. An additional factor, he said, was ABC's tepid prime-time weekday ratings at 10 p.m. (eastern). Yet Bettag contended that the sheer abundance of information from cable and the Web is precisely why Nightline should, in principle, endure: "Particularly when so much of what's on the tube is filled with people just telling you their opinion" and "at a time when people are saying, 'Hey, what's happening beyond our shores is really affecting my life in a lot of ways,' this is the broadcast that they know they can turn to." Nevertheless, he added, "You're not going to say, 'I guarantee we're not going to be here or I guarantee we're not going to be here.' "³⁴

Frontline

Established in the early 1980s, PBS's Frontline hit the airwaves as network news divisions increasingly were feeling the pressure to turn a profit, and "magazine shows" began to replace long-form documentaries in prime time. In many ways, it has that genre to itself, though it is now being challenged somewhat not by journalism but by documentary-style advocacy films sometimes aired in theaters, such as Fahrenheit 9/11.³⁵

In 2004, as part of a five-program election series, Frontline broadcast a two-hour dual biography of Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush. There was a two-hour examination of the first year of the war in Iraq³⁶, a one-hour program looking at "The Jesus Factor"³⁷ and an hour devoted to the question, "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?"³⁸ That work stands out in the current TV landscape. It continues to strike some as remarkable that PBS, alone in TV news, offers long-form biographies of the candidates.