2005 Annual Report - Network TV AudienceThe Audience for Campaign Events
Once again, 2004 demonstrated that conventions make a measurable difference in who wins, and how Americans perceive the parties, as have most conventions in the modern era. In 2004, John Kerry failed to impress undecided voters, missed the opportunity to define his vision of the country or explain his record, and set himself up for subsequent attacks on his military record. The Republican Party, in turn, succeeded in defining Kerry in GOP terms, laying out a broad plan for the future, depicting itself as populist and strong. And the President enjoyed an 11-percentage-point bounce in the polls.40 So the first part of the network argument - that conventions are not news - is problematic and insufficient as an explanation. What of the second part of the argument - that audiences can see the conventions elsewhere, so the networks need not air so much of them? Obviously people, especially cable and satellite viewers, can now go elsewhere. The critics believe, however, that that argument is insufficient because the networks are different from other channels. As broadcasters, they are still the closest thing we have left to a mass medium, and as such, they still have an agenda-setting power. The most popular program on cable news -Bill O'Reilly - has a viewership of about 3 million, which would get him cancelled on any of the networks. If the broadcast networks choose to air something, that makes it more important, and more people watch. The networks, in other words, lead public behavior; they do not merely follow it. That endows them with social responsibility.41 Who is more right here? Up to 2000, the research suggests that the critics had a point. The Harvard scholar Tom Patterson studied the decline in audience for the conventions from 1960 through 2000 and found that the networks were indeed driving rather than following the convention viewing behavior.42 When the networks first cut back on coverage, in 1976, (they ultimately went from 60 hours in 1972 to 25 in 1984) a gradual drop in viewership ensued. But there had been no drop before that to precipitate the network cutbacks. Then, when the networks began their second big cutback in convention hours in 1992, there was a lag before audiences began to drop again. When the networks did not cut back in hours, the audiences also did not drop. The most logical interpretation is that the networks helped create the audience decline. They signaled that the conventions were less important, made them less available to watch, and the public began to respond to that attitude. The audience, however, declined much more gradually than the airtime for coverage, which fell by more than half. What happened in 2004? The election generated higher interest than the campaign four years earlier, as measured both in voter turnout and most pre-election surveys. If the networks have no agenda-setting power, then logically the audience would have migrated to cable, but not necessarily shrunk overall. That is what happened. The Big Three commercial broadcast networks lost 3.4 million viewers for the Democratic convention and another 2.2 million for the Republican. But Fox News Channel, MSNBC and CNN gained some 2.9 million for the Democrats and another 4.4 million for the Republicans. And PBS by itself nearly doubled its audience, from a combined 3.8 million viewers in 2000 to some 6 million viewers in 2004. Added together, the combined convention audience increased by some 4 million viewers between 2000 (41.9 million) and 2004 (45.8 million).
By 2004, the networks' agenda-setting power seems to have dissipated. But they had a hand in shedding that power. With it came a certain responsibility. That responsibility is now gone, though with it, too, may go the power to direct people to watch entertainment programming the networks would like them to see.43 What did viewers who migrated to cable see? As it turns out, they didn't quite get to see the convention proceedings, or the kind of deep background reporting that the networks might have provided. A host of TV critics, as well as our own monitoring, reveal that for large portions of the conventions - even most of the time - Fox, MSNBC and to a lesser degree CNN used the conventions as a backdrop for their regular programming rather than covering the proceedings themselves. So Chris Matthews hosted panel discussions for much of each evening on Hardball. Bill O'Reilly debated guests during his prime-time slot. Larry King did his talk show. Those news channels turned to the podium only sometimes. The closest viewers got to seeing the conventions, even in prime time, was on C-Span, followed by PBS. The cable channels have not in any serious way tried to cover or duplicate what the networks once did in airing the conventions. To some this shows that cable channels, like the networks, have decided the conventions are now less newsworthy. To others, it reveals that the cable channels are structured in prime time more as a series of shows than newsgathering operations. PBS came closer to covering the conventions and had significant audience success. There is, as we noted before, truth on both sides.
Tuning In To FoxViewers 10 - 11pm, in millions
First night of broadcast networks' coverage. So in the end, the network arguments are partly right and partly wrong. The argument that conventions aren't news falters in the face of evidence that they are important to the outcome of the elections. The argument that, regardless, people can watch them elsewhere appears to be borne out in 2004, maybe for the first time, though what viewers got on cable wasn't quite what they would get on network. Perhaps the bitterness over this issue comes from what the networks don't admit to. The networks aren't really cutting back on conventions because they are scripted rituals. Inaugurations are scripted rituals, and the networks don't shy away from covering them. The difference is that inaugurations occur during the daytime rather than in prime time and the opportunity cost of pre-empting entertainment programs isn't as high as it is for eight full nights of prime time. That is the "message" Lehrer had in mind. By refusing to devote eight nights of prime time every four years to a major civic event purely out of public obligation reveals that the networks and their news divisions no longer feel as much obligation or see as much financial advantage in fulfilling that civic function. They now operate more as financial corporations than they once did and less as public institutions. The public interest is a smaller part of their decision-making, though it is bad public relations for their executives to put it in those terms. When asked to justify their networks' decisions journalists publicly denounced the party conventions and discouraged people from watching them. Economics was always part of the network calculation on conventions. But once, those events were a great way to establish the network brand, and helped turn network personnel into stars. People bought TV sets to watch the conventions, and the ratings were good. Now the economics has turned. The networks can make more money airing Fear Factor and Extreme Makeover - and even skip whole nights of the conventions altogether - because they can argue that audiences can find the conventions elsewhere on the dial.44 This year saw a new calculation: that what the networks gain in dollars by skipping so much of the conventions is worth more than the cost of the erosion of value in the network news brand. The networks may be wrong in that calculation - the damage to their brand may be higher than they think. Or they may be right - people no longer look to networks as public-service institutions and thus are neither surprised nor disappointed. But the calculation keeps moving in one direction, and logically, Americans will increasingly see the network news divisions more as a part of their economic institutions and decreasingly as public services. That change, 20 years of survey research has made clear, is at the heart of the declining credibility of the press more as a whole. Aside from the conventions, the networks had hardly abandoned the campaign. The Tyndall Report, which analyzes every weekday network newscast, reported the number of minutes for the whole year devoted to the campaign up slightly, 7%, and the highest since 1992.45 Then came the debates. The decision to air the three presidential debates and the one vice presidential encounter was not as complicated as the decisions about the conventions. These were two-hour events, on just four nights - a much smaller expense with much more limited impact on the networks' programming schedules. The debates also include the potential for the unexpected. Perhaps even more important, the audience numbers were also pretty good. Taking all networks and cable outlets together, the audience for the political debates is enormous. Airing them was genuinely a public service, since they carried no commercials. As a consequence, Nielsen does not list them among its most-watched programs, so many TV writers and scholars overlook their large audience. NBC News's coverage of the first presidential debate received the highest viewership numbers of any network for any of the debates, 17.2 million.
After enduring the critical and popular backlash of Election Night 2000, the networks demonstrated more caution in their projections of the race in 2004. They also had gone to a new polling operation to conduct their exit poll. The poll, however, was in its own way as flawed as four years earlier, overstating John Kerry's ultimate official vote in some 26 states, and overstating George Bush's in 4 others.46 Nonetheless, it is worth noting that on election night, all three networks outdrew any of the cable channels (though CBS and Fox News were not that far apart), a sign that when they actually do go head to head in coverage, the network brands still mean something more than cable news. According to data from Nielsen Media Research and various press accounts, the commercial broadcast networks lost some 10 million viewers from Election Night 2000, down to 36 million in 2004 from 46 million.47 Meanwhile, the major cable networks, Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC, picked up 6 million prime time viewers (17.2 million, up from 11.2), with Fox gaining the most.48 PBS gained another 600,000 over Election Night 2000, rising to 1.4 million viewers from 810,000).49 By this count, some three million viewers chose to do something else in 2004. Whether that was to watch entertainment shows, read to their kids, get even more detailed election news online or watch the live feeds on C-Span is unclear.
So was the campaign of 2004 a watershed for network news? More time must pass to answer that question. The networks are not quite honest about their reasoning in cutting back on the conventions, including abandoning entirely one night of each event. The exit poll problems also continue, and represent a continuing black eye. Yet the networks still make a commitment by pre-empting their programming for debates, inaugurations, election nights and more. They covered the 2004 election on their nightly news programs as much as or more than others in the recent past. But the networks have insisted for 20 years that they do not set the public agenda, they only follow it. In the past, the evidence suggested they were wrong. Now they may have succeeded, at least when it comes to the conventions, to making that a self-fulfilling prophecy. 
2005 Annual Report - Network TV Audience |
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