CNN Drops to Last Place Among Cable News Networks

Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images CNN’s Anderson Cooper

 

CNN, which invented the cable news network more than two decades ago, will hit a new competitive low with its prime-time programs in October, finishing fourth – and last – among the cable news networks with the audience that all the networks rely on for their advertising.
The official monthly numbers will be finalized at 4 p.m. Monday and will include results from Friday. CNN executives conceded that will not change the competitive standing for the month. CNN will still be last in prime time.
That means CNN’s programs were behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but even its own sister network HLN (formerly Headline News.) Three of its four shows between 7 and 11 p.m. finished fourth and last among the cable news networks. That was the first time CNN had finished that poorly with its prime-time shows.

Adam Rountree/Associated Press Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly

The results demonstrate once more the apparent preference of viewers for opinion-oriented shows from the news networks in prime time.
CNN has steered opinion hosts like Nancy Grace to HLN, while maintaining more news-oriented shows on CNN itself. When news events are not being intensely followed, CNN executives acknowledge, viewers seem to be looking for partisan views more than objective coverage.
Individually, the CNN shows were beaten resoundingly by all the Fox News programs, but also lost to all of the MSNBC programs, including a repeat of Keith Olbermann’s 8 p.m. edition of “Countdown,” which beat the 10 p.m. hour of CNN’s signature prime-time program, “Anderson Cooper 360.”
Again that was a first.
Mr. Cooper had 211,000 viewers to 223,000 for Mr. Olbermann’s repeat. That meant Mr. Cooper finished fourth and last in the 10 p.m. hour because, besides being well behind the leader, Greta Van Susteren, who had 538,000 viewers, he was also beaten by a repeat of Nancy Grace’s 8 p.m. show on HLN, which averaged 222,000.

Virginia Sherwood/NBC MSNBC’s Keith Olberman

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.
The only CNN show from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. that did not finish last was Larry King, which was third, ahead of the new Joy Behar show on HLN. But Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News had a huge lead with 659,000 viewers in that age group. Second was Rachel Maddow on MSNBC with 242,000.
Mr. King averaged 224,000 and Ms. Behar 181,000.
At 7 p.m. CNN’s host, Lou Dobbs was fourth, barely beaten by Jane Velez Mitchell on HLN, 166,000 to 162,000. The big winner was Shepard Smith on Fox with 465,000 viewers. Second was Chris Matthews and “Hardball” on MSNBC, with 179,000 viewers.

Keith Bedford for The New York Times HLN’s Nancy Grace

CNN’s performance was worst in the 8 p.m. hour. Bill O’Reilly on Fox News continued his long dominance with the biggest numbers of any host, 881,000 viewers. Mr. Olbermann, with his first-run program, was second with 295,000. Close behind was the first edition of Ms. Grace’s show with 269,000. Campbell Brown on CNN trailed with only 162,000.
CNN executives emphasized that the network continues to draw more viewers than all its competitors except Fox News when all hours of the day are counted.
CNN released a statement Monday saying, “CNN’s ratings are always going to be more dependent on the news environment, much more so than opinion-based programming especially in prime time.”

Top 25 Daily Newspapers in New FAS-FAX

NEW YORK Here are the top 25 newspapers in the country ranked by daily (Monday-Friday) circulation for the six months ending September 2009 from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The percent change compares the same six-month period ending September 2008.

Go here for more on this list by E&P Senior Editor Jennifer Saba, and here for a list of the top 25 papers on Sunday. For a list of the top 10 gainers this time around, go here.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- 2,024,269 -- 0.61%
USA TODAY -- 1,900,116 -- (-17.15%)
THE NEW YORK TIMES -- 927,851 -- (-7.28%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES -- 657,467 -- (-11.05%)
THE WASHINGTON POST -- 582,844 -- (-6.40%)

DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK) -- 544,167 -- (-13.98%)
NEW YORK POST -- 508,042 -- (-18.77%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE -- 465,892 -- (-9.72%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE -- 384,419 -- (-14.24%)
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER -- 361,480 -- N/A

NEWSDAY -- 357,124 -- (-5.40%)
THE DENVER POST -- 340,949 -- N/A
THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC -- 316,874 -- (-12.30%)
STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS -- 304,543 -- (-5.53%)
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES -- 275,641 -- (-11.98%)

The PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND -- 271,180 -- (-11.24%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS (e) -- 269,729 -- (-9.56%)
THE BOSTON GLOBE -- 264,105 -- (-18.48%)
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS -- 263,810 -- (-22.16%)
THE SEATTLE TIMES -- 263,588 -- N/A

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- 251,782 -- (-25.82%)
THE OREGONIAN -- 249,163 -- (-12.06%)
THE STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK -- 246,006 -- (-22.22%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE -- 242,705 -- (-10.05%)
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES -- 240,147 -- (-10.70%)

(e) Individually paid core newspaper five-day average reflects a reduced home-delivery schedule

Are You Ready to Subsidize Reporters?

By Bill Frezza

Have you ever stumbled on an oxymoron so stunning that it takes your breath away? Try coupling this with a case of chutzpah so revealing that the lack of shame on the part of those involved serves as prima fasci evidence that their elite cultural isolation has rendered them incapable of critical thinking.
Behold the "Independent Journalism Tax."
In order to preserve independent journalism in the age of the Internet, a national Fund for Local News should be created with money the FCC now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers.

This is the key recommendation buried on page 91 of a 100 page report issued last week titled "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" by Leonard Downie, Jr. Vice President of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism.
Lamenting the demise of the "hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last third of the twentieth century," these guardians of journalistic integrity recommend that your tax dollars be distributed to their brethren by "Local News Fund Council boards comprised of journalists, educators, and community leaders" to make sure that "advocacy journalism is not endangered."
Juxtapose this learned study with some recent poll data collected by the Pew Research Center.
Only 29 percent of 1,506 adults surveyed said news organizations generally get the facts straight. The facts! Sixty percent said the press is biased, up from 45 percent in 1985. Just 26 percent said that news organizations are careful their reporting is not politically biased.
The market appears to be speaking about how it views "advocacy journalism" as practiced by the likes of the money-losing Washington Post, reduced to bragging that its decline in circulation may finally be starting to slow. Kept alive by its profitable Kaplan division, one can only marvel at what sort of independence Leonard Downie would expect to maintain living on the dole. Reporters would have lots of company, of course, joining the ranks of bankers, car manufacturers, ethanol producers, and climate scientists who rely on the public weal for their daily bread. But independence? When was the last time you heard taxpayer-subsidized NPR bite the hand that feeds it?
The amazing thing about Downie & Schudson's study is that the vast majority of the pages are actually devoted to describing the amazing ferment being generated by new news-gathering organizations empowered by the low barriers to entry afforded by the Web. These are supported by a bewildering array of new business models, all interacting in a dance of discovery and renewal that the authors seem to mistake for the last days of Pompeii. What clearly irks them is the lack of professional training and credentials that they believe are required to turn college kids who aren't sharp enough to study medicine, law, finance, or engineering into paeans of virtue imbued with an ethos of Olympian detachment and moral rectitude.
Gimme a break. Have you ever read a newspaper article about an event you personally attended wondering which other planet the reporter actually visited that day? Have you ever been interviewed by a journalist with a major newspaper who had any subject matter expertise on the material he was covering? Were you fooled for one minute that he hadn't already written his story and wasn't just looking for sound bites that would fit his preconceived notions? Did you notice how lazy he was about tracking down a diversity of independent sources and how easily he could be guided into a self-referring circle of cronies? And these are the professionals?
At least when you read a blog you know what axe the author is grinding. Who needs an editor with a 29% success rate to check the facts when you know that ten more bloggers are poised to pounce? And thanks to the Internet we can all get our own hands on the same source material the reporter is reading and decide for ourselves. Case in point is the Downie & Schudson study. Go read the mainstream press reports on it then Google up the original document. The contrast is illuminating.
In the current era of single party rule, is there any chance that this further intrusion of the government into our lives might actually come true? Might we one day be forced to pay a tax every time we make a cell phone call to make sure the Press Room in the White House is stuffed with even more reporters eager to credulously swallow whatever nonsense comes out of the President's mouth? Could truly independent newspapers be forced to compete with government subsidized lapdogs like, say, truly independent banks or car companies?

Bill Frezza is a partner at Adams Capital Management, an early-stage venture capital firm. He can be reached at bill@vereverus.com. If you would like to subscribe to his weekly column, drop a note to publisher@vereverus.com.

Chin Music

by Louis Menand November 2, 2009

In 2008, half the people who watched the Fox News Channel were over sixty-three, which is the oldest demographic in the cable-news business, and, according to a poll, the majority of the ones who watched the most strident programs, such as Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s shows, were men. All that chesty fulminating apparently functions as political Cialis. Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.

By effectively cornering the market on anti-Administration animus, Fox News has had a robust 2009 so far, and the recent decision by the White House to declare war on the channel is not likely to put a dent in the ratings. That decision has dispirited some of the President’s well-wishers. It has also puzzled them. In American politics, it should be considered a good thing when, after you have won a Presidential election by more than nine million votes, your chief critics accuse you of filling your Administration with Nazis, Maoists, anarchists, and Marxist revolutionaries. That is the voice of the fringe, and the fringe is exactly where you want the opposition to set up permanent shop.
One line of objection to the White House’s effort to ostracize Fox News is that Presidential wars against the press are always futile and self-defeating. Are they, though? So we are continually told by, well, the press. Actually, most people don’t especially love journalists, and press-bashing has a mixed history. Lyndon Johnson alternately schmoozed and browbeat editors and reporters and got nowhere with either tactic. On the other hand, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew demonized the press programmatically during their first term in office and were reëlected by a near-record margin. Still, wars of words are distracting, and Obama campaigned as a listener—a contrast with his supremely deaf predecessor that was evidently welcomed by the electorate. Why are his spokespersons throwing red meat to Fox’s angry white men? Wouldn’t it be better to supply them with only tofu smoothies?
There is no point in splitting metaphysical hairs over the concept of objectivity: Fox News is a politically biased organization. It is the creature of Roger Ailes, a man who has as much claim as anyone to be called the founding father of mass-media politics. In 1967, Ailes was a producer on “The Mike Douglas Show,” in Philadelphia, when he met Richard Nixon. Nixon had every reason, after his disastrous performance in the 1960 Presidential debates, to regard television with dread, but Ailes persuaded him otherwise. Ailes left “The Mike Douglas Show” to help Leonard Garment and others invent the New Nixon, one of the great feats of modern advertising and the subject of Joe McGinnis’s book “The Selling of the President 1968.” Ailes later took over the cable channel CNBC; in 1996, Rupert Murdoch hired him to create the Fox News Channel. He knows his business.

One of the things Ailes knows is that journalism has changed since Agnew referred to the press as “a tiny and closeted fraternity of privileged men.” In 1969, “the press” meant a handful of broadcast networks and a slightly bigger handful of nationally read papers and news magazines. In those days, one could plausibly talk about a media establishment. Everyone’s head fit into the group photo.
No more. As Jeffrey E. Cohen documents in “The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News” (2008), the media has changed since 1968, as has the public’s relationship to it, and in complicated ways. There is a lot more news out there, but the audience for it is much smaller. And although political reporting today is both softer and more critical, it has less effect on how the public regards the President than it did back in the days of balanced disinterestedness.
One manifestation of these changes has been mass-media niche journalism, a development, made possible by cable, whose opportunities Ailes was one of the first to appreciate. The more crowded and competitive this field becomes—more news chasing fewer newsies—the more journalism approaches the condition of coffee beans and major-league breaking balls: you never dreamed there could be so many varieties. But, unless you are an aficionado of political spin, you may prefer to grab the remote and start browsing for “Frasier” reruns. The market for news is narrowing down to people who need an ideological fix.
This has led to widespread distrust of all news media. According to a recent Pew survey, public belief in the accuracy of news stories is at a twenty-year low. Only twenty-nine per cent of Americans think that news organizations generally get the facts right; sixty-three per cent think that news stories are often inaccurate; sixty per cent say that reporting is politically biased. Republicans have traditionally held the press in lower esteem than have Democrats, but the Pew survey shows that Democrats are pulling even. In the past two years alone, a period when Democrats had a lot of news to feel good about, Democratic distrust of the press grew by double digits.
In a climate in which bias is increasingly taken for granted, cable channels have every incentive to enhance their appeal to their core constituencies. Among cable-news channels, Fox News is rated favorably by seventy-two per cent of Republicans against forty-three per cent of Democrats, and MSNBC is rated favorably by sixty per cent of Democrats against thirty-four per cent of Republicans. Many viewers treat Comedy Central as a news channel. Cable news, in short, is a sandbox. People throw things at one another, not just for fun but for profit. It is not a distinguished venue for statesmen or their surrogates to spend their time in.
The dubious efficacy of a war on Fox News is not the only reason to feel qualms. It’s hard to kill the press, but it is not hard to chill it, and this appears to be the White House’s goal in the case of Fox. “The best analogy is probably baseball,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said—meaning that throwing a few inside fastballs, a little chin music, gets hitters to back off the plate. Maybe, but he should also remember that deliberately throwing at a batter is grounds for ejection. The state may, and should, rebut opinions that it finds obnoxious, but it should not single out speakers for the purpose of intimidating them. At the end of the day, you do not want your opponents to be able to say that they could not be heard. It may be exasperating, but that is what the First Amendment is all about. ♦

Obama outs Fox, but reveals a big flaw

Surely President Barack Obama and his advisers don't really think that their feud with Fox News will do anything but enhance the cable network's viewership. A deeper problem is what the flap reveals about Team Obama, which seems to be more comfortable with campaigning than governing.

I'm not happy about that. It does not fill me with glee to see Fox News star Sean Hannity joyfully replaying Obama's 2004 come-together speech about how we're "not red states or blues states" but "the United States of America" and asking where is Obama's promise now?

I don't agree with Hannity on much. He's only a tad more serious-minded as a news clown, in my grumpy view, than his colleague Glenn Beck. But, as much as my wife might run from the house when she hears me say it, Hannity's right on this one.

Sure, it is disingenuous for right-wing pundits to accuse Obama of dividing the country, considering the five-star job they have done in turning us against each other. But if Obama is being judged by a different standard of civility, it is a standard he set for himself. He promised to bridge Washington's culture wars, not fire them up.

That's why it was disappointing to hear what every administration does sooner or later, blame media for their problems. White House communications director Anita Dunn started the fracas by calling Fox "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Senior adviser David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel offered similar views and urged other media not to be led around by Fox on any stories.

Obama defended his team while also noting that he didn't spend much time thinking about Fox. Right. So why talk about Fox in such harsh terms? When powerful people lash back at the media that cover them, they only make the media look sympathetic. They boost their adversary's audience with curiosity seekers who wonder what all the fuss is about.

They also provoke a classic reflex: Other media and pundits from all sides circle their -- Our! -- wagons in solidarity, even when our embattled brothers and sisters make us feel like holding our noses while we defend the move.

In fact, Fox is what their defenders say it is, not a political organization but a news operation. It just happens to have some strong right-wing voices like Beck and Hannity who happen to be two of Fox's biggest audience attractions. Such phenomena were forecast in the movie "Network" in 1976. Back then the idea of a half-deranged demagogue set loose on a national audience for the sake of ratings still sounded far-fetched. These days the movie looks almost like a documentary.

But love Fox or hate it, it is a major news channel. Fox's credibility got a boost from two recent scoops that eventually caused other media to play catch-up: They hounded "green jobs" czar Van Jones into resigning, mainly because years earlier he signed a loony 9/11 "truther" petition, and they crusaded against the poor people's activist group ACORN, famously assisted by two young conservative freelance undercover reporters.

So the White House is pushing back. The administration's real goal: raise questions with other reporters so they'll double-check anything they hear on Fox before they run with it. Try to isolate and marginalize Fox's voice. Cut off Fox's influence before it blossoms into the rest of the mainstream media.

It's the sort of strategy that pops up when you're in campaign mode, a mode to which Obama's team is intimately familiar. But there also comes a time to ignore the yammering from the press box and pick up the olive branches of negotiations, compromise and reconciliation.

That was the big take-away in Sen. Lamar Alexander's thoughtful speech last week. The Tennessee Republican, who worked for President Richard Nixon, cautioned Obama against creating a Nixon-like "enemies list" of media, industry or congressional adversaries. That's a wise warning, even if the "list" in Obama's case appears to have only one name on it.

Hardball has its place. Obama doesn't have to cave in to his adversaries to get things done. But his inner circle could use the pragmatic, independent, old-school voice of, say, Ronald Reagan administration veterans like David Gergen, enlisted by Bill Clinton's White House, or Colin Powell, who has informally advised Obama.

Every president needs campaign experts. But every president also needs people who know how to slip off to the private meeting and bring leaders together in ways that also bring the country together. That's the change we're waiting for.

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