There was a panel at a summit in Colorado where someone was talking about their plans for fact based journalism on a new Al Jazeera America, and someone from MSNBC or one of the other cable networks was there.
It was a really wrenching exchange as the existing cable mogul defended the status quo, saying something like, "We'd love to have sophisticated news consumers tune in, but those people have complex lives and interests, they don't watch news every night, they just read it quickly online then go to things like the ballet. We run the market experiment with sober, deep, fact-based news every night against PBS. It doesn't win."
It's helpful to realize that even when Fox is top of the ratings, the viewers it has as a percentage of the American population are exceedingly tiny.
It was a really wrenching exchange as the existing cable mogul defended the status quo, saying something like, "We'd love to have sophisticated news consumers tune in, but those people have complex lives and interests, they don't watch news every night, they just read it quickly online then go to things like the ballet. We run the market experiment with sober, deep, fact-based news every night against PBS. It doesn't win."
It's helpful to realize that even when Fox is top of the ratings, the viewers it has as a percentage of the American population are exceedingly tiny.
In a Gallup poll in 2013, TV still leads, in surveys. But surveys overstate things, because people want to look like they actually consume news. http://www.gallup.com/poll/163412/americans-main-source-news...
On a strong weekday, Fox is looking at maybe 2 million viewers for the entire day: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/06/10/cable-news-ratin... (ie, under a percent of the US population).
It's easy to credit TV news with a larger cultural impact than it actually has.