Print Journalism Isn't the Only News in TroubleA Daily Kos poll conducted earlier this month shows that a minimum of 18- to 29-year-olds pay attention to cable news. The national survey was conducted over three days with 2,400 respondents. In that age demographic, 82 percent claimed to never watch Fox News, 65 percent stated they never watch CNN, and 75 percent reported never turning to MSNBC. The tallies for daily, weekly and monthly viewership were also decidedly lower than older age brackets'. A December 2008 Wall Street Journal and Gallup Poll corroborates the trend; it found that only 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 25 get their daily news from cable TV. That same data set also suggests that network nightly newscasts may have reached a trough in their viewership, and are now competing with cable news in terms of number of respondents tuning to them for news. It comes as little surprise for members of Gen. Y, for whom Jon Stewart's 2004 assault of Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on their ill-fated "Crossfire" TV show — whose ratings never recovered from the attack — marked a turning point in perceptions of news. While promoting a book, Stewart assailed the show's content as "theater," arguing it was a debate show insofar as "pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition." Stewart has become as close to a Walter Cronkite or Edward Murrow as this generation has found — there's little disputing that — but the real matter is what Turner Broadcasting, NBC Universal and News Corp. will take away from the foreboding polls. National Public Radio, on the other hand, has seen a boom in its audience. Last March, it released data putting its weekly listenership at 33 million weekly, a rise of 7 percent in year-over-year growth; each of its news programs set new audience-size records. The data read as a call for opinion-less news.
The cable news feed is designed for a different audience. When we go in search of opinion, it's overwhelmingly issue-specific experts we're after. A newscaster behind a desk regurgitating the same dribble available on every channel is not what we're seeking. Of course, there is a body of opinion-based news that is nowhere near as lethargic as the daily cable drone: Sunday morning roundtables, though few members of my generation follow them regularly because of the timing — read, hangovers — "Meet the Press," "This Week" and "Face the Nation" all exemplify what weekly news programming might aspire to. Cable shouldn't make the same mistake as print journalism and fail to read the writing on the wall. The paradigm is changing, and so is the viewership. Why read viewers twitter pages back to them and call in the same hack "analysts" and "strategists" each day to tell us things we can easily surmise? Back in 2004, as Tucker Carlson attempted to impugn Jon Stewart for asking softball questions of then presidential candidate John Kerry, Stewart responded: "You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?" What is wrong with you, cable? My guess is your executives won't prove wise enough to adapt to a change in demand — but I'd love to be wrong, and to have some insightful programming to gnaw on as I reconsider how thoroughly I misjudged. Brian Till, one of the nation's youngest syndicated columnists, is a research fellow for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington. He can be contacted at till@newamerica.net. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
