Americans Turning Off Rather, Jennings, Brokaw
They're just not watching Tom, Dan and Peter slant the news leftward these days; TV audiences are turning off network news broadcasts just as "Bias" author Bernard Goldberg said they would.
According to the New York Times, the total evening network news broadcast audience has been lower this summer than during the summer of 2001, when the pressing stories of the day were shark attacks and Chandra Levy.
Dan Rather's "CBS Evening News" has slumped badly. The Times reports that in late June, Nielsen Media Research reported CBS had one of its least-watched weeks for its nightly news report in at least a decade, and perhaps in its history. ABC didn't do much better, decreasing nearly 600,000 from last year.
Only NBC has avoided having its viewership drop precipitously.
According to Nielsen Media Research, about 24.1 million people watched the three evening newscasts each night, on average, in June and July, compared with 25.2 million during the two-month period last year and 24.3 million during June and July 2001.
Even the cable networks have lost some viewers, except for the Fox News Channel, which has gained viewers.
CNN's daily audience during June and July was, on average, 413,000, down from 502,000 last summer, according to Nielsen Media Research, and much smaller than its audience of 2.5 million during the thick of the war.
The daily average audience for MSNBC, which is owned by Microsoft Corp. and G.E., fell from 254,000 last summer to 197,000 this summer – down from 1.3 million during the war.
Fox News' audience however, jumped to 753,000, compared with 612,000 during the same two-month period last summer, but the Times points out that "the audience was nowhere the average of 3.2 million people who watched Fox News each evening during the Iraq fighting."
Of course, this is something like saying that fewer people watched baseball games in mid-season than watched the world series.
Observers blame the drop in viewers on news overload and the lack of sensational news stories.
"People have been through two years of very heavy-duty, stressful news, from Sept. 11 through the war with Iraq," Jim Murphy, executive producer of the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather," told the Times. "I think there's probably just a little bit of a break-taking going on across the spectrum."
Steve Sternberg, senior vice president for audience research at Magna Global USA in New York, an advertising buying agency, agrees. "Considering how much news there was with the Iraq war," he told the Times. "People are probably just taking a breath and saying, 'O.K., that's enough news for a while.' "
Burnout? So why is Fox News Channel viewersip ever-growing, as is the NewsMax audience?
Perhaps the reality is viewers are burned out on big media bias, not the news itself
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