Tim Rutten
LA Times
December 19, 2009
This era is like no other in American journalism: People are consuming more news than ever before, but they're also far more critical of its purveyors than they've ever been. We remain generally agreed that a free press is democracy's cornerstone, but there's less consensus than ever on what the news media ought to be -- or, for that matter, what rapid technological, economic and demographic change will allow it to be.
That makes three sets of little-noticed numbers released this week of more than passing interest.
The first set has to do with the audiences of the three cable news networks. For the first time, CNN's prime-time broadcasts will finish the year in third place, behind Fox and MSNBC among the 25- to 54-year-old viewers advertisers regard as the desirable television audience. To some, that seems to suggest that the television news audience is increasingly split along ideological lines. Fox has made itself king of the prime-time ratings hill by programming a slate of right-wing commentators, while MSNBC has set itself up as the progressive alternative. CNN's attempt to play it down the journalistic middle looks like a ratings loser.
So, is the lesson here that most Americans want their news refracted through the sort of forthrightly ideological lens both Fox and MSNBC now provide? No, and here's why. First of all, the universe of cable news viewers, while growing, remains relatively small. Fox's average prime-time audience increased an impressive 10% in 2009, but it still was just 699,000. MSNBC averaged 307,000 viewers and CNN 299,000. (A reasonably sized U.S. newspaper rolls up comparable numbers.) Moreover, over any given 24-hour period in 2009, the average Fox audience was 320,000; CNN had 185,000 viewers and MSNBC 149,000.
(More here.)
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