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Essay
Intro
In the 1990s, cable news networks replaced network television
for many Americans as the primary source for breaking news,
just as in the 1960s television supplanted newspapers. In
the new millennium, a broadband-enabled, always-on Internet
threatens to usurp those cable news networks. The recent tsunami
disaster, The New York Times noted, marked the first time
significant numbers of Americans turned to blogs for breaking
news.
Where does that leave network news? In 2004, the decline
in evening news audience continued, as did declines in prime-time
magazines. Morning news, in contrast, continued to see its
audiences grow. And despite the decision to abdicate coverage
of much of the prime-time proceedings at the nominating conventions,
on election night November 2004, twice as many people still
turned to the old commercial networks as did cable for the
results.
Nightly Newscasts
The discussion of network news audience trends usually begins
with the signature nightly newscasts.
They are the most famous news programs, and the audience
declines here are the most dramatic in TV news. Between their
peak in November 1969 and 2003, as we noted last year, ratings
for those programs fell by 59%. Was there any sign in 2004
that the trend was abating?
The answer appears to be no, though 2005 offers new possibilities.
Television audiences are counted in numerous ways. The most
familiar is ratings, which count the number of all television
sets in the U.S. tuned to a given program. Share is the percentage
of just those sets in use at a given time tuned in to a program.
Viewership is ratings converted into the number of people
actually estimated to be watching, since two or more people
are often watching a given set.
Between November 2003 and November 2004, ratings for nightly
news fell 2% and share fell 5%.
In absolute numbers, that means that in November 2004, 28.8
million viewers watched the three network evening newscasts,
half a million less than in November the year before. That
is a 45% decline from the 52.1 million people who watched
the nightly newscasts in 1980, the year CNN began.
The numbers translate into 2004 ratings of 20.2, down from
20.6 the year before. They represent a 38 share, down from
40 in 2003.
It's worth noting that a rating point (1% of American homes
with a TV set) implies many more people in 2004 than it did
in 1969. With population increases and demographic trends
like more single heads of households, there are many more
homes than 35 years before. Thus the decline in viewership
is not nearly as steep as the decline in ratings.
In 1980, the three commercial network nightly news broadcasts
had a combined 37% rating, and a 75% share. And at their historic
peak, in 1969, they had a 50% rating and an 85% share. The
November 2004 figures mean that ratings have fallen almost
59.6 % since 1969, and 45.4% sinc1e 1980. Share has fallen
55.3% since 1969 and 49.3% since 1980.
Does this suggest that people no longer want the kind of carefully
produced and edited, hard-news-oriented product they find
in nightly news?
The answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no. Last
year in this report, we went through a detailed analysis of
the myriad factors driving the decline. We found that a factor
often underrated is that the programs are on at a time - usually
between 5:30 and 7:00 - when a decreasing number of Americans
are at home.
There is also evidence, in survey data, that audiences are
not so much giving up entirely on nightly news as catching
it less often. The Pew Research Center for the People &
the Press has been asking Americans whether they watch evening
news since 1993.
The data show a precipitous drop between 1993 and 2000 in
the number who said they regularly watched nightly network
newscasts. Since then, however, the data show a gradual increase
in regular viewing. (The Pew Center's survey data suggest
that network and local viewership track with one another.
Both show a decline between 1993 and 2000. Both show increases
since, between surveys taken in 2000 and in April 2004.)
How could ratings drop while more people tell pollsters they
are regular viewers? Are the polls wrong? Not necessarily.
The likely answer is that what people consider "regular"
viewing has changed. And that is significant in trying to
assess the role network evening news plays in American culture.
People haven't simply abandoned network evening news. Many
still find it has value, more than the ratings might suggest.
But they watch it less often, for a variety of reasons (see
the 2004
Annual Report), including altered commuting times and
an increasing number of alternative news sources. That is
potentially an important insight for the networks, and may
signify a recognition of a fact seen in our content studies
both this year and last: that network nightly newscasts offer
a kind of content - quality of sourcing, seriousness of topic
and more - that viewers cannot find anywhere else on television.
It is also worth noting that the number of network evening
news viewers has not fallen in a straight line, but in cycles.
The mid-1990s saw rapid drops - 8.5% between 1994 and 1995,
then 3.4% in 1996, and, after a flat year in 1997, another
7.5% in 1998. Audiences actually grew by 3% in 2001, but then
fell 8.5% in 2002, and lost another 2.7% in 2003. At the margins,
audiences are attracted by major news events (impeachment
proceedings in 1997, the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the invasion
of Iraq in 2003). While the declines in 2004 continued apace,
they also fell on the low end of annual declines.
Importantly, these declines have occurred amid declines in
viewership of network television generally - soap operas,
primetime, sports and so on. News viewership has tended to
suffer less erosion than other dayparts.
Some analysts also believe that the decline in nightly network
news viewership may soon begin to level off. They argue that
most of the cultural shifts that have left fewer people at
home at 6:30 (even earlier on the West Coast) have already
taken place. The expansion of cable has slowed and in a few
years may be complete.
In effect, the structural factors involved in the decline
have already occurred.
Another possible element in viewership decline is that there
is now less news to watch than there used to be in a 30-minute
newscast because of increased commercials and promotions.
Viewers tune in to watch news, not advertising. But most of
the shrinkage in the newscast's news hole has already occurred.
Others wonder whether, with the retirement of Tom Brokaw
and Dan Rather, network news might be on the cusp of a further
decline. We think a closer look suggests that the retirements,
far from accelerating an inevitable demise-may present something
more interesting-a risk and an opportunity.
The programs risk losing some loyal audiences who sense a
loss of heft with the departure of familiar faces. Audience
loss for a specific newscast, however, may result in loyal
viewers' sampling competitors rather than defecting from network
news altogether.
If such a defection happens, even if the programs continue
to make some profit, the network owners may decide that they
could generate more revenue with other programming during
that time, and that the financial gain would outweigh any
public outcry over their abandoning the programs.
There is still a third possibility: The retirements of the
two anchors are an opportunity for change in the newscasts
in an attempt to attract new audiences. ABC, with Perter Jennings
still in the chair, may think it has an opportunity to regain
the No. 1 spot. NBC, the current leader, has a major stake
in ensuring that the new anchor, Brian Williams, keeps that
position. And CBS, after the embarrassment of "Memogate,"
has no reason not to take risks, innovate, and try to rebuild
a battered news division whose dismantling culminated, rather
than began, with the fiasco of that story.
To assess which of these scenarios is more likely, it is
worthwhile to go deeper into the audience numbers.
Nightly News Audience Demographics
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Race Among the Networks
Which network is winning and losing in the evening?
One thing that has not changed is the relative strength of
NBC Nightly News. While hardly immune to audience erosion,
it has succeeded in recent years by managing to lose fewer
viewers than its rivals lost.
Between 1993 and 2003 the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather
saw its viewership fall 37%. ABC's World New Tonight's viewership
fell 29%. But the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw fell the
least, just 18%.
What occurred in 2004? NBC was still on top with 11.2 million
viewers. Perhaps even more significant, that represented audience
growth of nearly 3% from 10.9 million in November 2003. And
this was the second consecutive year that NBC Nightly News
showed November-to-November audience gains.
The other two networks have not been so successful. As of
November 2004, ABC was in second at 9.9 million, down 2 %
(from 10.1 million the year before). CBS followed with 7.7
million viewers, down 7.2 % from 8.3 million.
In some ways, NBC's slight climb is all the more interesting
because of serious challenges it faces.
First, the network has lost its advantage in primetime programming
over the last several years as many of it prime-time mainstays
have ended. (In spring of 2004, the network ended the shows
Friends and Frasier). In the sweeps month of November 2004,
NBC had only one program in the top ten shows, and that was
ER, a holdover from the earlier era. CBS had six, and ABC
three.
On the other side of the coin, the CBS Evening News has failed
to gain competitively despite its prime-time success.
What impact does entertainment programming have on the success
of network news? TV professionals believe news and entertainment
audiences reinforce each other. More people watching prime-time
programs means more people being exposed to promotions for
news shows. Millions of viewers who turn off a certain network
at the end of prime time are inclined to stay with that network
when they next turn on the set, a so-called carryover effect.
For NBC, superiority in prime time in the mid-1990s and beyond
helped create a sense of brand about the network as a place
for smart, hip shows. CBS, in the days of "Murder She
Wrote" or "Diagnosis Murder," was the senior
citizen's crime-fighting network.
The second change at NBC is the retirement of anchor of Tom
Brokaw in December 2004. Dan Rather was set to leave the CBS
anchor chair in March 2005. Jennings, at ABC, is 66 years
old. At least some TV observers were expecting Brokaw's departure
and his replacement with Brian Williams to hurt ratings. "
'Nightly News' is likely to suffer some audience erosion once
Brokaw steps down, at least in the short term, perhaps allowing
ABC's World News Tonight, now No. 2, to climb past NBC,"
The Washington Post quoted the network analyst Andrew Tyndall
as speculating in April 2004.
So far, that doesn't seem to be the case, but history suggests
that audience habits move like glaciers rather than earthquakes.
There was similarly little major change when Walter Cronkite
handed over the anchor chair to Rather or John Chancellor
gave way to Brokaw. In the current climate, Peter Jennings
is a known quantity already "sampled" by most Americans.
Those who like him, he already has, so while Williams might
lure new people from Jennings, the opposite would occur only
if Williams drove them away. Meanwhile, CBS awaits a new anchor,
who might change the dynamic even further, though that may
be unlikely to happen in the short term when the veteran Bob
Schieffer takes over as interim anchor. Even then, Jennings's
familiarity might still limit his potential.
It is rarely questioned in television that an anchor's popularity
has a major influence on the ratings of the program he or
she is attached to. Even here, however, it should be noted
that during their time competing with each other, Rather,
Jennings and Brokaw have each held every spot in the ratings
competition, first, second and third. Given the diminished
viewership of nightly news, anchors clearly do not have the
same importance in the culture they once did. It seems difficult
to believe that 30 years ago an anchorman, Walter Cronkite,
was the most trusted man in America, whose reporting, the
author David Halberstam argued in "The Powers That Be,"
helped tip public opinion against the war in Vietnam in 1968.
Nonetheless, American TV networks still promote their anchors
as the face of their news divisions. And anchors are the face
of the networks during major news events, to the extent that
the nets still try to cover those events.
PBS
The audience trends for the The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,
which started in 1973 as The Robert MacNeil Report and later
became the half-hour MacNeil/Lehrer Report, stand in striking
contrast to those of commercial network television. Data published
in the PBS National Audience Handbook show that NewsHour ratings
were remarkably stable over the five years from 1998 to 2003,
averaging a 1.2 household rating. According to PBS, that translates
to roughly 2.7 million viewers each weeknight and more than
8 million different or "unduplicated" viewers who
watch at least one night a week.
That is still significantly smaller than even third-place
CBS. But the NewsHour's ability to hold its audience distinguishes
it in network nightly news.
There are several explanations of the NewsHour's stability.
One is the distinctive nature of the content - longer stories,
longer segments, less opinion. The other is the ability of
local PBS stations to air the program later or even rebroadcast
it in the late-night period. The addition of a BBC World News
half-hour lead-in in many markets may also strengthen the
NewsHour's appeal. Also, both host Jim Lehrer and senior correspondent
Gwen Ifill both moderated presidential debates in November,
while NBC, CNN and Fox News Channel had no representative.
At a time when Nightline and other magazine programs are having
difficulty, and commercial nightly newscasts are hemorrhaging
audience, the NewsHour's numbers suggests a health that is
unusual.
Morning News
In the mornings, the audience picture is one of stability,
but below the surface there appears to be some shifting.
Over the longer term, thanks to audience growth and lower
overhead, morning news has become increasingly important in
network news. Though the trend line is bumpy, at the end of
2003, 14.6 million people watched morning news programs, a
million more than a decade earlier.
In 2004, that number remained unchanged.
Why is morning news holding its own while evening is not?
The study outlined last year the factors that have made morning
TV more stable than evening (see the 2004
Annual Report) - more people at home in the mornings,
a 20-minute commercial-free block at the top of the broadcasts,
a flexibility of content and format, and a greater level of
experimentation over the years. Even with that, the audience
for the three nightly newscasts together is still almost double
that for the morning newscasts at any given moment. But because
they are on for at least two hours each day, they make more
than twice as much money as the evening shows.
Beneath that stability, however, 2004 saw some changes at
play. The perennial leader, NBC, is losing ground, and ABC
is gaining. NBC's Today Show saw viewership drop 3% from November
2003 to November 2004, from 6.5 to 6.3 million.
Some observers have wondered if Today might be losing momentum
in its content. An article in the issue of Broadcasting &
Cable magazine for February 23, 2004, noted that the program
had stopped dominating the "get" - getting sought
after individuals on-air ahead of the competition - as it
once did. Mel Gibson went to Good Morning America when he
launched his controversial blockbuster "The Passion of
the Christ," as did Howard Dean after his "I Have
A Scream" speech upon losing the Iowa Democratic primary.
Andrew Tyndall believes that the decision to stretch the two-hour
Today Show into a three-hour morning may have diluted the
first two hours of the program, perhaps by stretching the
staff's time and imagination thinner. That doesn't mean it
might not pay off financially. It may be worth it to NBC to
generate more revenue from a third hour, even if it pays a
price in a slight erosion of its rating lead in the first
two.
ABC's number-two-rated Good Morning America, meanwhile, saw
its audience increase by 4%, moving closer to the top-rated
Today Show. In November 2004, 5.4 million people watched the
program on average each weekday, compared with 5.2 million
the year before.
And CBS's Early Show, whose time slot has a long history
of changing faces and program titles and running a distant
third, had stable audience numbers with 2.9 million viewers
in November 2004, the same as in November 2003. That is the
highest viewership the Early Show has had since 1998, when
the figure was also 2.9 million. That still leaves CBS even
further behind in the morning than it is in the evening news
race.
A New York Times article in May 2004 suggested that CBS,
after many years of experimenting with its morning format
- everything from running all hard news back in the 1970s
to a show, in the late 1980s, that included the comedian Bob
Saget - may have hit on a successful formula.
In part, that involves a larger cast than its rivals. And
Tyndall's research notes other differences, including longer
news blocks, fewer hard-news segments (specifically reduced
coverage of Iraq and the campaign in 2004), more health, more
lifestyle, more consumer news, more cooking, and more self-promotion
of CBS's own prime-time programming.
Another ingredient involves tweaking the usual mold of two
anchors, a newsreader and a jolly weatherman. The CBS program
features four anchors, in addition to the weather reporter,
which gives the show a slightly different feel and rhythm,
more of a true ensemble resembling in some ways Barbara Walters's
program The View. But some roles remain firmly defined. Harry
Smith's role as the serious male anchor is still similar to
Charlie Gibson's at Good Morning America (At NBC, Today adopts
a more unisex, less gender-stereotypical share of the workload).
The big difference is that the role of the female anchor has
been split up among three women.
(Having several anchors also allows cast members to be absent
without upsetting the look and rhythm of the broadcast. On
the downside, it means CBS can't promote the program by showcasing
a dominant celebrity anchor like Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer).
The Sunday Shows
The Sunday-morning talk show world has been dominated in
recent years by NBC's Meet the Press, hosted by its Washington
bureau chief, Tim Russert. That continued in 2004. According
to the January 9, 2005 issue of USA Today, Meet the Press
averaged 4.3 million viewers for the season.
That would be a slight decline from the program's reported
average viewership for the 2002-2003 season,
4.7 million, but still reflects a comfortable lead over both
CBS's Face the Nation and ABC's This Week.
Face the Nation, hosted by Bob Schieffer, continues to be
second with an average of about 3.8 million viewers in 2004.
It is also the only half-hour program of the Sunday interview
shows.
ABC, which revolutionized the Sunday format in the 1980s
by converting the program to an hour, adding a reporter roundtable,
multiple interviews and setup pieces built around host David
Brinkley, struggled after Brinkley's retirement in 1996 (he
contributed commentary pieces until 1997). This Week continues
in third place in the Sunday morning news race with an average
of 2.5 million viewers in 2004.
ABC News's president, David Westin, has bet on the former
Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos as the new host. He persuaded
Nightline's renowned executive producer, Tom Bettag, to take
over the show. Bettag (who has since returned to Nightline
as executive producer) is as highly regarded a program producer
as there is in network TV. Many critics credit him for taking
Nightline, one of the most acclaimed news programs in history,
and making it markedly better, and reviving anchor Ted Koppel's
passion for the show. Before that Bettag produced the CBS
Evening News with Dan Rather when it was No. 1.
The Sunday morning time slot is the only one in which the
cable-based Fox News Channel has a regular presence on the
broadcast Fox network, with "Fox News Sunday with Chris
Wallace." It ranks fourth with around 1.5 million viewers
a week.
A discussion of the Sunday morning landscape would be incomplete
without mention of Charles Osgood and CBS's Sunday Morning.
The eclectic mix of arts, culture and politics celebrated
its 25th anniversary in 2004, and (despite worries following
Charles Kuralt's 1994 departure from the show) continues to
draw a loyal and growing audience that reportedly exceeds
some 4 million viewers a week.
Prime-Time Magazines
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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."
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."
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."
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.' "
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.
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 Iraq,
a one-hour program looking at "The Jesus Factor"
and an hour devoted to the question, "Is Wal-Mart Good
for America?"
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.
The Networks and the 2004 Elections
One of the most important questions about 2004 is whether
the presidential election will be viewed in retrospect as
a watershed (or merely another step) in the gradual decline
in public perceptions of the authority of network news as
a source about politics and major events.
Four facts from the campaign year are important in this regard.
- The networks carried only three hours of each convention,
skipping one night entirely - including the keynote address
at the Democratic event - the lowest number since they began
broadcasting.
- Not coincidentally perhaps, for the first time a cable
channel (Fox) outdrew each of networks (individually) in
viewers during the GOP convention.
- The networks also had record lows in viewership on election
night.
- After exposing the prisoner torture scandal in Iraq and
Afghanistan, CBS News's reliance on apparently phony documents
in the story that became known as "Memogate" proved
to be one of the most embarrassing moments in the network's
history. It prompted an outside investigation that led to
the ouster of four people and the early retirement of anchor
Dan Rather. The investigation did not examine the news division
as a whole. Its focus was narrow - on the reporting of one
story and the public-relations aftermath. The news division,
however, could end up being transformed anyway.
Before the convention season, there was no clear rise or
drop in the volume of campaign coverage on the evening newscasts
compared with previous years. The primary season was shorter
than usual, and unlike those of 2000, 1992 and 1988, involved
contests in only one party. As a consequence, the total number
of minutes of primary-season coverage on the nightly newscasts
was lower than in some previous years and higher than in others,
according to tracking from Tyndall Research. That appears
to be more a function of scheduling decisions made by the
Democratic National Committee, state parties, and voters,
not journalistic decisions made by the networks. At the peak
of the primary season, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the coverage
showed no diminution from previous cycles.
That coverage, however, was soon overshadowed by the decision
of all three networks to walk away from covering the conventions
every night.
In late July, the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics
and Public Policy, part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government
at Harvard University, hosted a panel discussion at which
Peter Jennings of ABC "…[likened] conventions to
'infomercials'… There's not a great deal of reason to
show up."
The NewsHour's Jim Lehrer responded: "We're about to
elect a president of the United States at a time when we have
young people dying in our name overseas, we just had a report
from the 9/11 commission which says we are not safe as a nation,
and one of these two groups of people is going to run our
country. The fact that you three networks decided it was not
important enough to run in prime time, the message that gives
the American people is huge."
The exchange offers a snapshot of the argument over the network
decision to substantially leave the conventions.
That argument, played out mostly in brief quotes and sound
bites in news stories, deserves detailed examination to determine
whether, as Lehrer implied, the message the networks were
sending was either significant or new.
The network argument is really twofold. First, the conventions
are no longer newsworthy because they are scripted "infomercials."
Second, the networks are relieved of their public service
obligation to air them because the conventions can be watched
on cable - in particular on the three news channels, as well
as C-Span - along with PBS on the broadcast airwaves.
The critics counter that those are excuses. The networks,
they say, are backing away from the conventions purely to
make more money - they can do better airing reality shows
than the conventions - and in the process the networks now
have given up not just on public service but on journalistic
credibility, too.
Let's take the points one at a time.
The notion that the conventions are not news defines a news
event as one at which something unexpected might happen. Certainly,
the conventions are now scripted. Everything - the platform
debates, the speeches, the "spontaneous" demonstrations
- is controlled in advance.
(In 1972 The New York Times discovered the GOP had a script
for every moment of its meeting in Miami.)
The unexpected is not the only kind of news, however. It
can also be defined as an event, however planned, that has
a major impact on public opinion. The networks do cover this
second kind of news when it suits them, from inaugurations
and funerals to State of the Union addresses and other ritual
civic events. And by this standard conventions clearly qualify
as news. Not only do they represent the only time most Americans
will hear either candidate explain his vision for the country
at any length, but they are also the lone opportunity for
the two political parties to do so, and for other party leaders
to introduce themselves to the country beyond eight-second
sound bites.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Fox
Viewers 10 - 11pm, in millions
| |
Democratic Conv. (Mon.) |
Republican Conv. (Tues.) |
| Fox News |
1.4 |
5.2 |
| CNN |
2.6 |
1.5 |
| MSNBC |
1.0 |
1.6 |
| NBC |
4.5 |
5.1 |
| CBS |
4.6 |
4.4 |
| ABC |
4.4 |
4.3 |
| PBS |
3 |
2.2 |
First night of broadcast networks' coverage.
Source: Data for commercial broadcast and cable networks from
Nielsen Media Research as published in the New York Times
on September 2, 2004.Data for PBS provided to the Project
by the network.
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.
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.
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.
Average Viewership of the Presidential Debates, 2004
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Average viewership
of three debates
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Design
Your Own Chart
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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.
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.
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.
PBS gained another 600,000 over Election Night 2000, rising
to 1.4 million viewers from 810,000).
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.
| 
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