The Pew Research Center's latest State of the News Media report is out, and as usual it has all kinds of interesting data about things like the slow-motion demise of the newspaper industry (an exaggeration, but only slightly) and the diminished state of network news. But for the moment I want to look at cable news, a medium that occupies a great deal of the attention of people like me who comment on the media. Take a look at this graph:
Those numbers go up and down week to week, and they'll probably increase some in 2016 as we get into a presidential campaign, but still, we're talking about a median combined audience in prime time of Fox, CNN, and MSBNC combined of less than 3 million, or fewer than one in a hundred Americans. So why should we care about the latest outrageous thing Bill O'Reilly said?
It isn't completely illogical. Cable news matters in part because those 3 million include a lot of influential people. And cable can set an agenda for other media; one of the reasons Fox News exists is to push stories helpful to Republicans and harmful to Democrats into the rest of the media by hammering on them relentlessly (sometimes they succeed at this, and sometimes they fail). Also, cable news has two basic topics: breaking news and politics, both of which are things the people who write about news and politics are interested in.
But I think the main reason we media analysts are interested in cable news is that it's full of personalities in a way other media aren't. As horrifying as the thought may be, local TV news remains the top source of information for Americans; around 24 million people watch their late-night local broadcasts, while 23 million watch the early evening broadcast. That dwarfs the audience for cable news, but people only know the local news anchors in their city, and even they are pretty much interchangeable; you could switch from your local NBC affiliate to your local CBS affiliate at 6 o'clock, and you'd probably be getting pretty much the same thing. But that's not the case if you switched between Sean Hannity and Chris Hayes.
And unlike the people who produce content for other media, we see them in full. Most readers don't pay attention to the bylines on the newspaper stories they read, and even if they did, all they would know about that person is a name. NPR has a much bigger audience than cable news as well, but those are just voices that don't have faces attached to them, and what personality they do have tends to be shaped into that smooth, friendly, reassuring, serious-with-just-the-slightest-hint-of-whimsy NPR persona. Do Audie Cornish and Melissa Block seem like totally different people to you? Maybe in real life they're nothing alike, but not on the air.
So like so much else, cable news is interesting because it revolves around distinct and distinctive protagonists and antagonists, in a way most other news media don't. Even if you can't bear to watch more than a few minutes of it at a time.
