Almost a month ago I noted that the TV Critic for WaPo, Hank Stuever, reported ratings for the world news coverage shows of the old-line broadcast networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, were way up. Now WaPo’s Margaret Sullivan notes ABC’s World News Tonight is doing particularly well:
The other evening news programs — anchored by NBC’s Lester Holt and CBS’s Norah O’Donnell — are also on a roll. …
ABC is leading the evening-news pack, averaging more than 12 million viewers each night for the past five weeks — more than double the viewership of the most popular prime-time shows on cable, which seem to get so much more media attention. (Hannity’s recent interview with Trump was considered a huge ratings win at more than 5 million.)
I am cautiously optimistic about this movement towards old, old news shows that know how to get it done properly and know the importance of trying to get it right. This, too, is encouraging:
Like cable news, all of the evening newscasts tend to attract an older audience for whom it is “appointment viewing,” just before or just after dinner.
But in these strange days, World News Tonight has been doing well with the sought-after audience known as “the demo” — those between ages 25 and 54. The newscast garnered more than 3 million of those relative youngsters during the first week of April.
Sure, the big networks are not independent – ABC is owned by Disney, for example – and they’re not run by angels. But they’re also mostly not in the cable TV morass; they are from a tradition of trying to get it right because that was how they held on to their broadcast licenses. So far as I know, they don’t have political ideologies to prop up, as did Fox News under the leadership of co-founder Roger Ailes, himself a former media aide to disgraced President Richard Nixon (R).
And, pragmatically speaking, they are half hour shows, which fit in with the busy schedules many of us still keep, even in the face of Covid-19. On the down side, these are not subscription services, which means we’re not putting a little skin in the game. For me, when there’s money flowing directly between a service and its consumers, that money is an encouragement for the service to do right by its consumers. When the service is funded entirely by advertisers, not only is there danger of improper influence from advertisers, but the influence of the viewer becomes less important – and can even disappear.
But it’s broadcast TV, what are you going to do? Yeah, yeah, I know in Britain you buy a license along with your TV, and that revenue presumably goes to broadcasters. It’s not really the same thing, though, is it? Cable TV doesn’t clear the bar, either, as the money goes to the cable provider and, from them, onwards to the producers – there’s no direct connection. In fact, we buy way more than we want to see when we buy a cable package. My Arts Editor periodically has to turn off those channels we don’t want to see, just to get rid of the clutter.
I don’t expect the entire population of the United States to descend upon these shows and begin to show a little sanity in their thinking. But just a minor movement is enough to eclipse extremists, and make others think.
