As recently as the late 1980s nearly 90 million people were watching the major network's evening newscasts. Just 5 or 6 years ago 30 million people watched the three major networks evening newscasts. Now the ratings show about 24 million people watch those newscasts. The number of people watching is getting smaller each year. Also the average age of the viewers to those newscasts are getting older. Older people are a creatures of habit. They have been watching the evening news for a long time.
You may recall that CBS got rid of Walter Cronkite when he was still fairly young. They replaced him with Rather and kept him until they had to fire him. They were afraid of losing the old people if they fired a 74 year old Rather.
Now that they have fired Rather thay have decided to go with a younger woman. But she can't be too young or they will lose all the old people. So they hired an over the hill news babe. She will not attract young people and old people will not like her either. NBC hired Brian Williams.. Anyone but me notice he is just like Brokaw but with out the speech impediment?
The case for full time news channels is it allows viewers to watch newscasts when they want to watch them.
NBC has 9 million viewers for their evening news, and another 4 million for the Today show.
But over a 24 hour news cycle FOX will reach 15 or 16 million people. The most watching at anyone time is 2.3 million but they are on 24 hours a day doing news.
Comparing the MSM newscasts with one news cast on FOX is not the real comparison of influence and people reached. The 60 million people that stopped watching the MSM evening newscasts went somewhere.
We can conclude that they just stopped careing about news, or that they are watching the news when they want to watch it.
That's a good point about the 24 hour news cycle and how many people FNC reaches; I'll sleep better tonight remembering that! LOL
Interesting data about news watching habits.
We haven't watch the regular MSM newscasts for years. Can't remember when we stopped, or why.
I wonder why Fox has never considered putting the Brit show on its regular station at 5 PM. It is far and away the best news show on television and the only one I watch.