July 12, 2006
I might be hopeful...
...if I thought it mattered. Viewership of broadcast evening news programs is plummeting. We're talking a 20% falloff in six months.
A combined 21 million people watched the three "big" evening news programs: ABC, NBC, CBS. By way of contrast, that many people watched FoxNews at 8pm on July 10.
Conclusion? Broadcast news is no longer relevant. It doesn't matter if they continue to skew left: no one cares. The first link has a good explanation of why this might be: in essence, the evening news has become such a small segment of networks overall newsroom that it has stopped mattering to both the "journalists" and their superiors whether or not anyone actually watches the show and whether or not the show is actually profitable. Ergo, the agendas of the "journalists" involved increasingly outweighs reporting actual news. Ergo, people stop caring and stop watching.
Rathergate was kind of an example of this. Rather running the piece on 60 Minutes was intended to detonate the Bush campaign. But CBS doesn't have the reach that it once did. But when it turned out that the documents had been faked, CBS became a huge target. They stood to lose a lot more than they stood to gain.
