Influence of Cable on Television News Audiences

Abstract

A comparison of television viewing in the [1982][1983][1984][1985][1986][1987][1988][1989] years shows u steady decline of network news viewers, especially among those with pay television. A comparable decline is not found for local broadcast news. The increase in viewing of CNN and the related Headline News was steady, but mostly accounted for by the general expcinsion of coble, now in about GO% of American homes. One coiild orgiie that cable either merely diverts uudiences from the truditionul networks or that cable services mtually win over niidiences from the networks in head-to-head competition, cind this study finds some evidence that cable is winning the competition.With penetration exceeding 50% of U.S. television households in the late 1980s, cable had the potential to affect television journalism in two ways. The first might be called the "diversion hypothesis." The multichannel offerings of cable television could divert audience from network and local broadcast news. This effect would be felt as a result of the increases in cable penetration, the number of cable channels and the share of audience for cable-only programming, all experienced i n the 1980s. The data reviewed in this study clearly support the diversion hypothesis for broadcast network news. Substantial audience losses in the 1980s may be attributed to cable households. Local broadcast news audiences, with exceptions in a few circumstances however, seemed invulnerdble to the cable diversion.T h e o t h e r hypcithesis might be t e r m e d t h e " c o m p e t i t i o n hypothesis." Here it is assumed that the head-to-head competition of the 24-hour cable news networks in national and international news would erode the broadcast network news audience. This effect would not pertain to local station broadcast news audiences because the principal attraction in that case is the local news. Therefore, the 24-hour national

Selling News: Behind the Content of Cable and Broadcast Morning Shows

“…I think we're eating our young" (Pauley, 2005). Meanwhile, researchers have focused on differences between the audiences for cable and broadcast news (Bae, 2000;Baldwin, Barrett, & Bates, 1992), story selection on network newscasts (Stempel, 1985(Stempel, , 1988Grosheck, 2008), influences affecting news story selection (Shoemaker & Reese, 1995), commercialism in new media (McAllister & Turow, 2002), and the effect of corporate synergy on news content (McAllister, 2002;Williams, 2002). There are no empirical studies that look exclusively at the morning shows and their treatment of promotional content across both broadcast and cable networks, as this study does.…”

Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences

“…Moreover, TV news has long been subject to partisan bias. In particular, the advent of cable TV in the late 1980s ( 29 ) and its expansion through the 2000s ( 30 ) brought with it 24-hour partisan cable news channels, some of which have captured large audiences from middle-of-the-road broadcast networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC ( 27 , 31 ). Although cable news consumption is determined by viewer preferences, not background algorithmic decisions, the highly routinized programming style of prime-time cable news has some of the same properties as a partisan-biased ranking algorithm.…”