Five million people still watch the CBS Evening News? Drudge points out those numbers are lower than ever, but I can’t imagine who in the world would want to receive their news in that manner anymore. I mean the whole idea of an anchorman or woman delivering the events of the day is so passive and passé (and weirdly Soviet), it’s mind-boggling to think so many people participate. Well, I guess change is hard and human gullibility endless, but still… You’d think that in the age of the Internet, with so many news sources available, people would want to engage more and surf alternative sources. [Have you even watched the evening news in the last five years?-ed. Nope. If I want to know what they're saying, I can read the New York Times. That's where they're getting it all anyway.]
I strongly suspect that most people still watching these dinosaur news programs are minimally 70 years old. This is simply an old habit that they can’t abandon. The Internet is deemed too challenging. Am I right? I have not bothered to research this matter. There is indeed a good possibility that the three major networks are losing most of their news audiences to the grim reaper on a daily basis.
If you want to get an idea about a TV program’s audience, look at who makes up the target market for the commercials. While I dropped any and all CBS News programs during the 2004 “Fake but Accurate” debacle, the commercials I remember were aimed at the elderly.
Yup, David has it right, it’s old people who are still watching the network news.
Here’s some data from journalism.org: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_networktv_audience.php?cat=2&media=6
There are two figures of note in this report. The first is the graph “Evening news viewership over time”, which is most closely modeled as a rock falling out of the sky (the most naive analysis indicates 0 viewers in 30 years). The second is the chart “Median age of nightly news viewers”, note that the bottom of this chart is 58.5 years.
The average nightly news viewer is over 60 years old. Even so, by my crude calculations, only about a quarter of the population of the US over 60 watches the evening news, in comparison only 6.6% of the US population aged 18-60 watches.
I consider that given the human interest story crap and funny formatting, this is the epitome of infotainment.
Of course, I don’t find it entertaining, but que sera sera.
Have you even watched the evening news in the last five years?-ed Last five years, how about last 15 years? The last remnants may be old, but they vote which is how we got into this MSNBC-style mess.
I think if a true analysis is made the viewers would be from middle America and small town’s in those states. Watching evening news, in most cases
is given with slanted info to began with. At 76, my computer screen allows me to research truth from false reporting. I believe most seniors in our
major cities are like myself, computer activated…Also, the active seniors even into the 80′s today are not in rocking chairs and they also are fed up with old news including the paper press, delivered to the fron door. Since we do not demand as much sleep in our senior years, the computer is an all night active friend and by morning we have digested our coffee and the foriegn news and market before it is even reported on the tv screen.
PJTV is an eye opener to all of us, it sure makes my night & day, and I too am going for that new voice activated Iphone, as a surfer, it opens more doors.
Tom Wolfe observed that the news anchor is the modern equivalent of a Linotype machine, formatting and displaying content which was written by someone else.
The only time I see evening news is when I’m at my mom’s house. And even there, I can usually get her to turn it to the ballgame. The last time I saw both local and national news at one sitting was at my 87 year old grandmother’s house.
I watched PBS’ Newshour a few days ago–I was in a “captive audience” situation–and it was almost surreal. It was like watching someone reading fairy tales in a news format. Almost nothing that was “reported” was remotely true or relevant. I haven’t watched PBS or network news in years and get almost all of my news online or from FOX and was amazed at how much it has deteriorated–and it was bad enough when I gave it up.
I stopped watching CBS news—forever—when Roger Mudd did a late night stand-up routine on the lawn at the White house, during the early months of Reagan’s first term. Mudd was so sneering and insulting that I nearly punched out my TV. That was in 1980.
The only reason I can think of to watch the CBS news is the possibility that they would lose the desk and put Cutie on a barstool. Like all those delicious lovelies on Italian television.
I think David Thomson is right. 5 million sounds like a lot, but it’s about 1.5% of the American public.
Roger: Don’t be such a snob. Special Report with Brett Baier is as informative as it gets. Any show that gives one a daily dose of Charles Krauthammer is worth watching.
If I want to know what they’re saying, I can read the New York Times.
How long do you think that will be true?
Now that all TV broadcasts are going digital this week, how many viewers will the Big 3 news programs continue to have? I would argue that a large part of the audience for them are those people who have never gotten cable TV or the internet.
For example, my wife’s elderly grandmother. She always used an antenna TV and had no internet connection, so the only news program to which she had access was one of the Big Three. Pending the “big switch,” one of her children convinced her to finally get cable TV and now they’re just a few of a dozen choices – and she no longer has to get her news during the dinner hour. She can tune in to one of the news networks and get the news any time of day or night.
It’ll take some time for viewers like her grandmother to find other news sources, but I would look to see the network news numbers start to fall precipitously over the next 12 to 24 months as their formerly captive audiences avail themselves of their new choices.
Grandpa still watches, hoping that Cronkite will return…