CONCLUSION:
Even though the evening news broadcasts are profitable, their audience is aging and dwindling as cable and Internet news alternatives explode. Viewership of ABC's "World News Tonight" has fallen to about nine million people a day from 13.6 million in 1991, according to VNU NV's Nielsen Media Research.
The traditional networks took a hit to the jaw this summer when News Corp.'s Fox News Channel drew a bigger audience than they did during head-to-head coverage of the Republican National Convention. Fox gives conservative commentators more prominence than do its rivals, so analysts expected it to do well covering the Republican convention, but by beating the broadcast networks outright -- a first for a cable news channel -- the industry viewed it as an indication of how a wide audience is shifting its allegiance away from the networks. Time Warner Inc.'s Cable News Network, which for years hewed more closely to the traditional network-news model, also has fallen behind Fox.
"The ability for the news operations to withstand these kinds of bodypunches is diminished," says Frank Sesno, a professor at George Mason University who was CNN's Washington bureau chief in the late 1990s.
Walter Isaacson, former chairman of CNN, says: "Every time there's a mistake that blows up into a controversy there's a danger of editors saying a tough story isn't worth the trouble."
The network news presidents dismiss such fretting. "The CBS story doesn't mean that people should or will back away from smart, investigative reporting," says Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News, adding that the only restriction GE "has ever given me is to get it right."
COMMENT:
Institutional bias and Old Media hubris will blind the MSM to what is happening, as revealed by Shapiro's incredibly naive statement (above) "The CBS story doesn't mean that people should or will back away from smart, investigative reporting."
The Pajamascenti will increasingly run circles around the network dinosaurs because the PJs are not isolated from public scrutiny and can self-adjust to get the story right -- quickly, cheaply, reliably. Interactive collaboration produces the best news product while democratizing the process as we have never before seen.