To: i-node who wrote (798447 ) 7/31/2014 12:29:59 PM From: tejek Read Replies (2) | Respond to "All three major U.S. cable-news networks -- Fox News, CNN and MSNBC -- saw a dip in total viewers for the month of July compared to the same period last year, according to Nielsen Media Research. For Fox News, a subsidiary of 21st Century Fox (NASDAQ:FOXA) and the most-watched cable news network for more than a decade, the dip was negligible : Viewership was down 3 percent to just over 1 million total viewers for July. It’s really hard to wring insight out of a week or a month,” said Jesse Holcomb, lead author of the Pew Research Center’s annual “ State of the Media ” report, which has tracked cable viewership habits since 2004. trial verdict on July 14 for Trayvon Martin's killing, as well as the aftermath of racial tension that followed. All three networks scored big during that event, with a combined viewership of more than 10 million viewers, as the Hollywood Reporter noted . Earlier that month, the captured-on-video crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in San Francisco also boosted viewership.The unbeatable Fox News had the top 14 highest-rated shows on cable news, with Bill O’Reilly’s “The O’Reilly Factor” at No. 1 with 2.8 million average nightly viewers, followed by Megyn Kelly’s “The Kelly File” with 2.3 million. But Holcomb pointed out that not even Fox is safe from the myriad market changes slowly disrupting the cable-news industry as a whole, including the growing trend of cord cutters and inexorable shifts in the way young people consume news . Research from Pew shows total viewership for Fox, CNN and MSNBC peaked around the 2008 presidential election, and has been on slow a steady decline since, leaving all three networks struggling to attract fresh eyeballs and fighting over a larger piece of a shrinking pie. “It’s an aging audience for cable news,” Holcomb said. “These networks, as much as they may try, are not necessarily able to build up a younger audience in the way they want to.”
