Traditionally in times of national crisis, like the war in Iraq, viewers have turned to the networks for coverage, if not the first night, then within a day or two.
That did not happen in 2003 with the war in Iraq, and some television writers called this an important change, another signal of decline for the network news and the evening newscasts in particular.20 [1]
The total number of viewers tuned to nightly news actually dropped during the war. After rising just slightly the first week of the war, to 32.2 million viewers, nightly news viewership fell as the war continued. The number of viewers on the three nightly newscasts dropped by 2.7 million the second week of the war and 1.6 million more the third week as American soldiers got to Baghdad.21 [2] On cable, by contrast, ratings more than doubled during the war (see Cable TV Audience [3]), though that audience has vanished since.22 [4]
Does this spell an even more dire future for nightly news, as some journalists have predicted?
Not necessarily.
A closer look at the Iraqi war ratings suggests two other lessons.
In a head-to-head moment, when cable news and network news are both in continuous live coverage, Americans still prefer the old broadcast networks.
On the first night of the war, from 9:30 to 11 p.m., 42.2 million people turned to the three networks and their nightly anchors, according to estimates made by Nielsen. Less than half as many (19.2 million viewers) tuned to the three cable networks, and 7.7 million more turned to Fox News on broadcast. Combining Fox broadcast and Fox cable would put Rupert Murdoch's two channels in second place among the networks (at 15.6 million), well behind the combined NBC and MSNBC (at 22.2 million). But that would be ahead of CBS (at 13 million) and ABC (at 11 million), neither of which has a news cable sibling.23 [5]
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Viewership between 9:30 pm and 11:00 pm on the night of March 19th, 2003
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Source: Jesse Hamlin, "NBC declares victory in war's TV ratings battle," San Francisco Chronicle, quoting Nielsen Media Research data.
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A further look at the ratings also suggests that people turn to network for some things and cable for others. During times of intense crisis, the continuous 24-hour coverage of cable may be appealing. Indeed, the networks converted to continuous coverage during the first two days of war and saw viewership spike, then went back to regular programming and saw viewership fall. The contrasting formats we found in the content of evening newscasts versus cable are also instructive. Evening news specializes in taped packages, cable in live stand-ups. The Pentagon's embedded reporter program tended to showcase cable skills (felicity with extemporaneous first-person monologue) and made traditional newsgathering (interviewing, fact-checking, getting all sides of the story, editing) logistically impossible.
But during other times, when events are moving more slowly, people may still look to the somewhat more reflective coverage offered by the once-a-day evening newscasts. The run-up to war may be a case in point. Nightly news viewership actually rose in the weeks leading up to the war. The highest ratings in 2003 occurred in mid and late February, when 32.7 million viewers tuned in to the three evening newscasts, according to Nielsen Media Research. The Tyndall Report said that these two weeks were dominated by coverage of Hans Blix's preliminary report on Iraq's weapons programs and the United Nations debate on a resolution in support of using military action against Saddam Hussein.24 [7]
NBC Fares Best, Wins the War
The network that drew the most viewers during the war was NBC. In the first week of the war, NBC's "Nightly News" recorded its single highest number of viewers for the entire year (13.2 million viewers). While NBC's "Nightly News" picked up a point in share during the week, ABC and CBS lost a point each, though the bump in viewers at NBC was short-lived. One interpretation of these share figures is that NBC's gain was at the expense of ABC and CBS.25 [8] Yet another interpretation is that during major news events, marginal news viewers tune in to the network nightly newscasts, and do so disproportionately to the time slot leader (in this case NBC). At the same time, some hardcore evening news viewers, news junkies, defect to 24-hour cable. Thus ABC and CBS might have lost more viewers to cable than they gained in new viewers, while NBC gained more than it lost to cable. This is, however, only a theory.