Reuters columnist Jack Shafer argues that the audience for cable news has peaked:
The consensus view put the onus on the Web: Now when big news breaks, the polled pundits agreed, the curious go to the Web (often via their mobile device) instead of cable news. Outside the Beltway‘s Doug Mataconis speculated that the potential audience for overtly liberal (MSNBC) and overtly conservative (Fox) TV news had maxed out.
Other possible reasons for the cable news slump is that the three channels (plus CNN’s subsidiary channel, HLN), approached maximum carriage on large cable systems years ago. Upwards of 90 percent of U.S. households already subscribe to cable or satellite TV, and most carry the news channels, so there are very few eyeballs out there that would like to tune in to CNN, Fox News and MSNBC but can’t.
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As we have written about before, and as Shafer notes, the cable news channels spend an inordinate amount of time covering banal political maneuvers (despite Howard Kurtz‘s erroneous argument). Politics is an inherently difficult field of news to cover objectively, as, with the exception of journalists, essentially everyone interested in the day-to-day political coverage is already engaged and extremely biased.
With the rise of of the political (and entertainment, and science, etc) blogosphere, there is less of a need to tune in to cable news unless something is happening right now. Any big interview will be on a slew of websites minutes after it happens on TV, and the political analysis and quirky stories that make up so much of the programming will be forgotten by everyone involved within a few hours.
All of the cable news channels have been on a downward trend ratings-wise over the last few years. As Shafer notes, 2011 was essentially flat from 2010, and there was a lot more news in 2011 than in 2010. 2012 is looking to be rough for Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, despite it being a political year, which executives at all three assured me would mean boffo ratings for them.
One thing Shafer didn’t mention was May sweeps, which, during a slow news month, surely drew millions of people away from other programming. A single sweeps period cannot make up for a few years of stagnancy, however.
Of course, as Inside Cable News notes, it may only be that the current cable news format has peaked. If a channel were to change things up, and create a distinctly different type of format, then maybe new viewers would be lulled away from “Dancing With the Stars” or “Family Guy.”
What do you think about Shafer’s argument, does he have a point? Or will he be proven wrong?