No one is really watching Cable News

CNN was the first cable based news station to be invented to broadcast 24 hour, seven days a week. Over the past 30 years it has spawned clones of itself (Headline News), multiple imitators (Fox News & MSNBC), and numerous speciality derivatives (Bloomberg & CNBC). Under the original ownership of Ted Turner, the station produced novel real-time and informative reports about American politics and international news. Viewers were able to see in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, and national events as they occurred. When Saddam Hussein wanted to know how the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 was going, he’d routinely turn to CNN’s live broadcasts with Peter Arnett and Bernard Lewis at the Al Rashid hotel in Baghdad to get his information.

This month CNN dropped to fourth place in terms of viewers, falling behind Fox, MSNBC, and even its own sister-channel HLN. While it is simple to bemoan the death of critical analysis and the concomitant rise of entertainment or fluff media masquerading as news, the real question one should ask is who is still watching these stations? Fox News proudly pounds its chest at coming first month-over-month, but is that title even meaningful? Consider the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and its off-shoot the Colbert Report, two fake news shows that get 50% more viewers than FOX’s number one evening show the O’Reilly Factor. It gets worst. Spongebob Squarepants, a Nickelodeon produced children’s cartoon, gets five times more viewers than the Factor (yes I know, I’m comparing rotten tomatoes with squishy sponges).

Here are the numbers:

For the month, CNN averaged 202,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 – the group that television news organizations use as their basis of success because of their advertising sales. That was far behind the dominant leader, Fox News, which averaged 689,000. But it also trailed MSNBC, which had 250,000 viewers in that group and HLN, which had 221,000.

Given the amount of energy that goes into producing and distributing these programs, why are any of these stations in existence? With more than 300 million citizens, surely there are more than a few hundred thousand persons interested in the daily happenings in the world? First, the viewers of these shows skew towards the elderly and the DC-NY-LA technocrat class who dictate to the general population what they need to be told and more importantly what cannot be said. PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer gets higher ratings than all the cable news programs combined. One can assume that people who are interested in real facts and not opinionated drivel or state sponsored propaganda have long left American cable for other media like the internet or international carriers (i.e. BBC, CBC, France24).

Second, much of what is broadcasted simply isn’t news. In pursuit of advertisers’ dollars, management have dumbed-down content for the larger population. By putting lipstick on Michael Jackson’s dead corpse, Anne-Nicole Smith's drugged body, OJ’s wife, or a plethora of other tabloid stories and wheeling it out for public consumption, they have essentially ceded any credibility as agents of democracy who are tasked at holding the powerful in check.

No one is really watching, listening, or caring what is on any of these channels. No one cares what Anderson, Bill-O, Greta, Glenn, Campbell or any of these talking heads have to say, because it is of no consequence or value to the majority of the entertainment guzzling and consuming American public or those who actually independently think.