State of the News Media 2006

When it comes to cable news audiences, PEJ is more interested in the median than in the averages.

"By the measures the cable channels use -- simple averages -- all the cable news audience was basically flat in 2005. By the method we prefer -- looking at median audience -- Fox News is still gaining, while CNN and MSNBC continue to lose audience," the report's intro states.

According to PEJ's calculations, overall viewership of cable news grew 2.8 percent in 2005 over 2004. (FNC, CNN and MSNBC combined had 5.5 million viewers in 2005, compared to 5.35 in 2004.) The nets showed more substantial growth between 7 and 11pm.

Cable News Prime Time Median Audience:



But, the study cautions, the overall prime time and daytime numbers are deceiving, "since all of the growth in viewership at the three main cable news operations was due to Fox News...The other channels actually saw declines in their median audience." Here's the full report...

The Project for Excellence in Journalism isn't fond of cable news. In its cable television intro, The State of the News Media 2006 says:

"For the third straight year, our content analysis of cable suggests that it is thinly reported, suffers from a focus on the immediate, especially during the day, is prone to opinion mongering and is easily controlled by sources who want to filibuster. All of these raise questions about whether cable news will suffer if audiences begin to feel more comfortable with video and text on news websites as a substitute for getting instant news on television."

Some of the comments in the May 11 content analysis are worth highlighting:

> "For much of the day, cable anchors function more like traffic cops than investigators."

> "The more we study, the more the cable channels begin to look distinct from one another. On May 11, indeed, they differed more in what they covered than the broadcast networks did. On CNN, the plane scare was dominant. Fox focused more on the grisly murder case in Illinois. MSNBC was the most interested of the channels in Macaulay Culkin's testimony at Michael Jackson's molestation trial, a story, interestingly, that its sister broadcast, the NBC Nightly News, didn't even mention."

> "Another difference on Fox in the morning is that it has abandoned the more disinterested neutral voice of traditional broadcasting. It is a clearly American channel, with the U.S. government frequently referred to in the first person plural -- 'we' and 'us.'"

Here's the Cable TV section of the report...

I frequently tell reporters and observers that I believe one of the three evening newscasts has to try something radically different, because the broadcasts are simply too similar. PEJ's "Day in the Life of the Media" documents this problem:

"Perhaps to an even greater degree than we found in the mornings, viewers got strikingly similar information regardless of which of the three evening newscasts they chose." On May 11, "the likenesses so outweighed the differences that the biggest variable among the shows on this night was probably the differences in style and personality of the anchors, NBC's Brian Williams, CBS's Bob Schieffer and ABC's Charles Gibson.

In the first two thirds of the newshole on May 11, the newscasts covered the same news, and in much the same way. In the remaining seven minutes, ABC and CBS had only one 'package' that was unique to their newscasts. NBC had two, and all four were feature stories."

> Also: ABC had 11 stories, CBS had 10, and NBC had 9.

Here's the Network TV section of the report...

The beginning of PEJ's Network TV intro includes this aside:

"This was the year people in network TV news had anticipated for a generation. What would happen, they wondered, when the three flagship evening news anchors left their chairs? Privately, at least one of those anchors worried that his network might stop airing a nightly newscast altogether."

According to the footnotes, this worry was expressed in a "private conversation with Tom Rosenstiel." So who was worried? My bet is Dan Rather...