Ehhhhhhhh, could be.
http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/narrative_cabletv_audience.asp?cat=3&media=5
The Battle for the Top
Anyone who has followed the cable news industry over the two last years has surely heard that Fox News has overtaken CNN when it comes to audience. Or has it?
Looking only at Nielsen data, the most widely used source, the picture seems pretty clear. For 16 years, since its inception in 1980 until the launch of Fox News and MSNBC in 1996, CNN had a monopoly over cable news. Since late 1996, Fox News has grown rapidly. MSNBC, despite being carried on more cable systems initially than Fox News, never seemed to gain many viewers. Soon, it was largely a two-network race.
Starting in 2001, CNN began to lose viewers while Fox News slowly but steadily built an audience around shows such as"The O'Reilly Factor."5 The election dispute in Florida represented a boon for the medium, with viewership at all three networks spiking significantly in November 2000 compared with the rest of 2000. Then, in the election aftermath, Fox News held on to more of its new viewers than CNN.
In January of 2002, Fox News for the first time surpassed CNN in total viewers and held its lead. This was due more to big CNN losses, however, than Fox News's fairly steady but modest gains in viewers. (Fox News at the time averaged 1.1 million viewers in prime time versus 921,000 for CNN. MSNBC, a distant third, averaged 358,000 viewers in prime time.)6
A year later, in January 2003, Fox News had maintained its advantage (with 1,014,000 viewers on average, compared with 721,000 for CNN, and 252,000 for MSNBC).7 And immediately after the war in Iraq, it appeared in May that the network was possibly pulling farther ahead, holding onto more of its wartime audience than CNN.
In the months since, however, Fox News's losses have actually accelerated, and its margin over CNN has narrowed slightly. Still, as of December 2003, Fox News has drawn better ratings than CNN in every month since January 2002 - 24 consecutive months as the cable news leader.
In 2003, the median monthly viewership of Fox News was 770,000 daytime viewers and 1.4 million in prime time, 52 and 62 percent more, respectively, than CNN. In December 2003, Fox News averaged 1.4 million viewers in prime time, and 961,000 in daytime, both roughly 60 percent more than CNN. In conventional ratings terms, Fox News is well ahead.
Two elements, however, need to be understood about the Nielsen data. First, Nielsen measures only the viewers in private homes. Thus, there are not reliable data on how many viewers tune in at work, the gym, airports or elsewhere. (About 18 million travelers are exposed to the CNN Airport Network each month, according to CNN).8
Second, Nielsen data measure only how many people are viewing a given program at a given time. This is what matters to advertisers. But the numbers do not tell us whether the people who are watching a given program at one time are different people or the same as are watching another program later on.
In other words, the ratings data do not tell us how many people watch cable news overall. There is no number here that would be analogous to newspaper readership or circulation, or the number of "unique visitors" to a Web site.
This may have worked fine for describing the appeal of broadcast television, where every show was a distinct product. But it misses something in capturing the scope of a medium like cable television, where much of the broadcast day is indistinct from another part.
As a result, CNN executives argue, the ratings numbers significantly undercount CNN's real total viewership and may overstate Fox News' appeal.
CNN executives argue that their internal research suggests that through the course of the day, more different people check in on their network for news updates. Fox News, they contend, has a smaller overall audience, but Fox News's audience is more loyal and watches for longer periods of time, thus giving Fox a slightly bigger audience at any given moment.9
Is this just network PR spin?
Actually, there is some public research to suggest CNN may have something of a point.
The only way now to find out how many people overall are watching a given cable station, or even cable news generally, is through survey research rather than ratings. The survey work by the Pew Research Center has examined this over several years and finds that while Fox News is gaining, CNN actually is cited by more people as the source they turn to for most of their news.
In October 2003, in the latest data available, 17 percent of those surveyed cited Fox News as their primary news source, while 20 percent cited CNN. And in July, closer to the March/April war in Iraq, during which Fox News enjoyed a spike in ratings, CNN's margin over Fox News was even bigger - five points rather than three (27 percent versus 22 percent).10
Thus, Fox News is widely understood in the general press as the cable news leader in viewers, and at any given moment, which is what advertisers care about, that seems true. In another sense, however, Fox News' dominance is less clear. It is possible, but hard to pin down, that more Americans turn to CNN over time. But they are spread out over more of the broadcast day or even week.
Looking at the survey data, MSNBC remains a distant third, as is the case with ratings. Just 6 percent of respondents cited MSNBC as their primary source of news in October (and 9 percent in July).11