The Case For Nightly Broadcast News – And What’s Wrong With Cable News
To do a real dissection of where cable news has gone wrong would take more time and space than I have here but to summarize the problem, one could make the following observations. These are points that have been brought up before by others before me so they should be familiar ones.
1) Ratings trump all – Eyeballs matter. Every cable news president you ask will say the same thing; that stories matter, that content and compelling TV is king. But it’s a hollow argument to make. The bottom line is cable news is a business and a business can’t survive if it doesn’t make money. The key to making money in cable news is part branding and part viewership retention and ratings. In some ways viewership retention and ratings fold back into branding because of the way the daily and weekly ratings are used to drive PR buzz to a degree not seen in the broadcast news sphere. If one looks at the amount of ratings buzz generated on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis for cable news via media blogs, MSM media writers, and that other dying breed that is the trade publication – which really is dying by the way – and compares it to the buzz generated during the same time frame by the broadcast networks’ news programs, well, to say the race isn’t even close does a disservice to the notion that there really was a race in the first place.
“We live in a cable news world where ratings and PR matter more than quality of news judgment.”
The PR buzz ratio for cable news vs. broadcast news is completely out of whack and lacking in proportionality. Broadcast nightly news delivers viewers on a daily basis that none of the cable nets, including FNC, can currently attain with their dayside straight newscasts. But the PR buzz is overwhelmingly on the cable side. There is a pretty large disconnect happening here.
Why is PR buzz important? It’s important because the cable news ratings buzz tends to impact the reason and the purpose for cable news’ existence. If a cable news show has a really bad night or a really big night, rest assured by the end of the next day the story will be all over the internet and will make a substantial showing in some of the print media as well. If it was a really bad night, you will no doubt see one or more articles, usually on a blog or website, about how the show is in big trouble and the host can’t cut it. If it’s a really big night, articles will pop up noting the fact which by extrapolation suggests the show’s competitors can’t cut it. Never mind that to ratings researchers and the advertisers who pay for spots on the network the really bad/big night is considered to be an outlier and not indicative of a trend. The PR buzz trumps the reality. The danger here is that the PR buzz can in some circumstances change the reality as the PR buzz becomes the conventional wisdom. And conventional wisdom can go a long way to making or breaking a show or show host.
On the broadcast nightly newscast side of the equation, buzz and ratings are treated more rationally by those who cover them. Sure, they get press, but high or low nights are more fairly treated as outliers. Long term trends, some over the span of years, tend to govern what changes occur to format or talent. This is partly because of the perception that broadcast newscasts exist in perpetuity, whereas cable news shows are viewed as more unstable with an unknown shelf life, though some programs, particularly during high flying FNC’s prime time, are considered immortal because the conventional wisdom is one would have to be insane to make a change. Conversely FNC’s dayside and weekends have seen lots of changes over the years despite the fact that the network dominates those time periods as well.
Here’s the point. Because the broadcast nightly newscasts aren’t operating under the constant threat of death, unlike their cable counterparts, they are less risk adverse and less prone to go to quick fixes that compromise their core mission. It should be noted however that this situation is not immune from outside corporate tinkering regardless of ratings success or failure. Cable news on the other hand is far more prone to format changes, talent changes, producer changes, and editorial changes because the constant threat of death is much higher. And the driving force behind that pressure, excluding the aforementioned “corporate meddling” is PR buzz and ratings.
In an antiseptic imaginary world where things like PR buzz and ratings don’t matter, the purpose of cable news is to deliver the news; all the news, and the quality of news judgment is paramount. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in a cable news world where ratings and PR matter more than quality of news judgment.
We see this manifest itself all the time. A high speed car chase can take up to an hour of cable news’ time. Structure fire? They could do fifteen minutes on that. A lockdown in a school? They can make an hour out of that easy. Bomb threat? An hour and a half; more if it’s in Washington, New York City, or an airport. Dog stuck flowing down a river in Los Angeles? They’ll stay on it as long as it takes to rescue the dog followed by several minutes of replays. And if it’s a celebrity scandal or, even better, a court case? Forget it. It’s wall to wall coverage until the public gets bored. Excluding the bomb threat and celebrity scandal scenarios, these scenarios have two things in common; they’re local news stories and they generate TV eyeballs. It’s the crack cocaine of the cable news world. They can’t resist pandering to a local story that has video because it’s water cooler material and it keeps viewers glued to the TV until there’s a conclusion.
Contrast this to what the broadcast networks do with similar stories. For most of the previously mentioned scenarios we’d get maybe 20 seconds with a voice over and some video. Rarely do we get a whole segment on it. Some stories, particularly of the tabloid nature, don’t merit a mention at all. Cable news? No such luck. Is it good news judgment to have a national news organization with world wide resources drop everything and focus in on something that only affects a handful of people? In the antiseptic imaginary world the answer is no. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where ratings matter more than news judgment does. It’s all about the eyeballs. Which leads me to my second point.
>>>NEXT PAGE: The second problem with cable news – politics.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
