May 28, 2007
How Important Is Television News? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:45 PM EST Having lived in England for the better part of the last four years, I’m consistently struck by Europeans’ widespread but erroneous assumption that the Fox News Channel (a) dominates the American news market; (b) attracts more viewers than any other outlet; and (c) reflects the opinions of most Americans. In fact, as of six months ago Fox News averaged 840,000 viewers each evening. The channel’s most popular on-air talent, Bill O’Reilly, attracted roughly two million nightly viewers. These are impressive numbers when measured against Fox’s cable competitors, CNN (448,000 viewers) and MSNBC (270,000 viewers). But when stacked up against network news, Rupert Murdoch’s behemoth looks considerably smaller. Recent figures peg ABC’s World News With Charlie Gibson at 8 million viewers, NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams at 7.3 million viewers, and The CBS News With Katie Couric at 6.1 million viewers. More striking, National Public Radio, often accused of liberal bias (though that charge is disputable), reaches 20 million listeners. Its signature news shows, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, enjoy larger audiences than any radio program except Rush Limbaugh’s. Liberal or not, NPR is arguably one of the most thorough broadcast news outlets in the world, and its audience dwarfs that of Fox News. More fundamentally, I wonder just how influential television news really is. In American history courses, including those that I teach, it is axiomatic that the advent of television played an unusually large role in shaping recent politics and culture. Without taped coverage of Birmingham and Selma, the civil rights movement would have had a tougher time selling its legislative agenda to sympathetic Northerners; without news feeds from Vietnam, antiwar sentiment would have been slower to emerge. But is this really the case? Until 1963 the three networks offered only 15 minutes of national news each evening. CBS and NBC switched to the 30-minute formula that year, and ABC followed suit in 1967. Yet in October 1969, at the high-water mark of 1960s social upheaval (this was just weeks before the Moratorium Day protests against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech), a survey reported that more than half of the adult population had not watched a newscast in the preceding two weeks. In 1976 the Roper Organization found that more than two thirds of poll respondents claimed to get most of their news from television, but the ratings told a different story. Newspaper readership still eclipsed TV news viewership. A 1974 survey of 5,600 Americans over the age of 18 found that “on any single, average day, the television news audience includes only about half of the adult population while only one adult in five sees the showcase of the medium, the evening network news.” This meant that what little news Americans were watching by the 1970s tended to be local news, which became sillier and more frivolous as the decade wore on. Once reported by sober-looking, nondescript, middle-aged white men, local news in the ’70s became the preserve of attractive on-air talent with little or no background in journalism. Local stations eagerly adopted the advice of broadcast consultants who argued, as did one typical 1970s-era concern, for “simplifying and limiting treatment of complex news, and elimination of ‘upper-class English.’” Increasingly, the focus of local news moved from current events to sensational and salacious doings (“Masked vigilante arrested wearing no pants! Film at 11.”), and the sales pitch for news teams was their affability rather than their knowledge or journalistic talent. Hence an advertisement that promised viewers “good news or bad, laugh a little with your News-4 favorites. You’ll feel better.” Back to my original point, just how relevant is Fox News? A recent study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that of the three cable networks, Fox devoted the least attention between December 2006 and April 2007 to the Iraq War. During its daytime programming, the channel devoted just 6 percent of its coverage to Iraq and 17 percent to the death of Anna Nicole Smith. By comparison, CNN allocated 20 percent of its coverage to Iraq and 5 percent to Anna Nicole Smith; MSNBC, 18 percent Iraq, 10 percent Smith. Overall, Fox spent 15 percent of its time on Iraq, compared with 25 percent and 31 percent for CNN and MSNBC respectively. If I were Fox News chief Roger Ailes, I wouldn’t want to talk about Iraq either. The war that his channel so ardently supported has lost its popular support, and so much of the news that comes out of Iraq each day is bad news. But again, Fox News draws a modest audience, probably no larger than the local news audience in many medium-size cities. Maybe it’s best to leave the hard news to NPR, so that Fox can concentrate on lighter fare. Like, “The emperor has no clothes! Film at 11.”
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