Back in the land of mainstream media resurgence, Margaret Sullivan of WaPo continues – without any hint of schadenfreude – to talk about where people’s loyalties are moving in this time of crisis and turmoil:
For the second week in a row, “60 Minutes” was the No. 1 prime-time show in the country, with an audience hovering around 10 million. (By comparison, a show like MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” which generates so much buzz, is lucky to score an audience of 1 million; and even the most popular prime-time cable shows rarely hit 5 million.)
Sure, direct comparisons are always a chancy affair, but ten million viewers for a news show that specializes in deep dives rather than rapid skims, featuring deeply respected and highly experienced journalists – compare to Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson of Fox News – is a good sized audience, although I’d argue there’s a lot of audience to go in a nation with 254 million adults (as of 2018) – that is, they have the attention of 3% of the adult population.
I suppose I should hurry up and admit I’ve never watched 60 Minutes myself, and I’m not sure why not. Maybe I didn’t have the attention span for it, yet I’ve read Lord Of The Rings at least half a dozen times, so you’d think I could last through an hour long deep dive news show.
That said, what I’d dearly like to see is a survey of 60 Minutes viewers with pertinent questions: Do you watch cable news? If not, did you in the past? Why did you stop, or why don’t you now?
Is it a matter of trust? Is it a matter of overt or covert political slanting of the news? What are the political inclinations of 60 Minutes viewers, and have they changed over the past five years?
I remain fascinated to see if Americans continue to watch broadcast national news by the big three broadcasters in bigger and bigger numbers, or if this is a tidal phenomenon. If it’s not, that portends a major change in American society – a change that fringers on both the right and the left will hate.
