When trying to understand the audience for cable news, these questions stand out:
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How many people watch cable news, and is that number growing?
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Who is really No. 1?
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How many people watch cable news versus broadcast?
The answers, we found, are not as simple as some people may think.
It has become fashionable of late to describe the current era as "the age of cable rising." The ratings surge during the war in Iraq is usually cited.
The truth is much more complicated. If looked at clearly, the cable audience is really no larger today than it was two years ago.
The notion that cable is surging is based on numbers translated for journalists by the cable channels themselves, which convert the Nielsen ratings data into annual "averages." By that accounting, thanks to an enormous but brief spike during the war, the cable news audience is described as surging. As reported in the press, Fox News in 2003 was up 53 percent overall (to 1 million viewers on average) and 45 percent in prime time (an average of 1.7 million viewers) over the year before. CNN had a 24 percent rise in all day viewing (665,000 at any given time) and a 22 percent jump for prime time (to 1.1 million).1 [1]
Yet such "averaging" tends to create a misimpression, the idea that the audience is spread relatively evenly through the year. In reality, cable ratings are among the most volatile in journalism, spiking and falling wildly with news events. A yearly average implies the typical cable audience is larger than it usually is. Instead, there is something closer to a normal base level cable audience most months punctuated by occasional spikes during rare major news events.
In mathematical terms, this would translate into looking at the median (defined as the middle value) rather than the average. For instance, taking the average viewership for 2003 and comparing it 2002 shows a large increase in the cable news audience - up 34 percent for the day and 32 percent for prime time. However, if we take the median, or the middle value of the 12 months, cable viewership was basically stagnant, showing no growth during the day and a gain of just 3 percent in prime time. Looking at the medians, CNN and MSNBC lost viewers in 2003, while Fox News saw an 18 percent rise in its median monthly audience.2 [2]
2003 Median and Average Audience Growth from 2002
| Median | Average | |
| Daytime Cable | 0% | +34% |
| Prime time Cable | +3% | +32% |
| Daytime CNN | -11% | +20% |
| Prime time CNN | -6% | +20% |
| Daytime Fox News | +18% | +53% |
| Prime time Fox News | +18% | +44% |
| Daytime MSNBC | -13% | +17% |
| Prime time MSNBC | -19% | +22% |
Source: Nielsen Media Research
Going back even farther, a detailed month-by-month analysis of cable shows the following basic story line over the last six years. Cable audiences saw a gradual growth after the launch of Fox News and MSNBC in 1996, then a jump after September 11, 2001. Since, then, however, the cable news audience at any given time overall is probably most accurately described as flat except for the beginning of the war in Iraq in 2003.
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1997 to 2003
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Source: Nielsen Media Research unpublished data, www.nielsenmedia.com
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1997 to 2003
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Source: Nielsen Media Research unpublished data, www.nielsenmedia.com
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Cable viewer data are generally broken down by daytime and prime time. Looking at audiences each month, fewer than 700,000 people watched cable during any given daytime moment between October 1997 and July 1998, and fewer than 1.2 million watched in prime time.3 [5]
That changed when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal led to the Clinton impeachment proceedings in August 1998. The average daytime audience broke the 700,000 level six out of the next seven months. Prime time exceeded 1.2 million every month. But the audience began drifting downward again after the impeachment proceedings ended.4 [6]
The Florida election fiasco in November 2000 proved to be the next major boost for cable. Daytime audiences doubled and prime time audiences nearly did that month, and while audiences began to recede again, they never fell back all the way to their previous levels. For each of the first eight months of 2001, audiences were larger than they were in the same month the year earlier.
Then came September 11, which seemed to create a structural change in the appeal of cable news. The average daytime cable audience in September 2001 surged well above 2 million for the first time. It has not dropped below 1.3 million since, more than double its usual monthly total before then. The prime time audience surpassed 4 million viewers for the first time, and has not fallen below 2 million since. Cable had a new sea level - nearly double what it was in 1998.
Yet since September 2001, there has been no rise in that base level audience. Even the war in Iraq in 2003 did not have the kind of lasting impact on cable that September 11 did.
The war did represent a boon for cable news. When it began in March, cable ratings nearly tripled from the week before. For April overall, more than 6.9 million people watched cable news in prime time on average at any given time, a new monthly high (see Sidebar on this page).
Yet the gains were short-lived. In May the monthly average number of viewers watching in prime time plummeted back down to 2.7 million viewers, in June to 2.4 million and in July to 2.2 million.
The war, in other words, did not change the base level audience.
Another way of looking at this is to look number of people watching cable news each month year to year. From September 2000 to August 2002, cable had a positive year-over-year audience growth every month in daytime and every month but one in prime time.
Yet since then, that growth has stopped. In four of the last six months of 2003 fewer people were watching cable news in both prime time and daytime than the year before.
In other words, cable news has held on to basically none of the viewers it gained during the war.
The cable news world is certainly much bigger than it once was. The typical base level for audience cable news is more than double what it was six years ago. And the spikes during major news events may be higher, too. More people turned to cable during the war than ever before.