For eight years the television industry, noting the steady decline in ratings for ABC, CBS and NBC, has said that fewer and fewer Americans are watching the national political conventions.
As Sportin` Life, a character in ”Porgy and Bess,” put it, ”It ain`t necessarily so.”
This year, when such alternative channels as PBS and such cable entities as CNN, C-Span, MTV, the Nostalgia channel and Comedy Central are factored in, it appears that more, not fewer, people watched the 1992 Democratic National Convention than tuned in when it was in Atlanta in 1988.
To be sure, combined ratings for the three big networks, which this year cut their coverage to little more than an hour a night, showed a total audience of about 17 million households, down 17 percent from 1988.
But PBS, in the mix for the first time and sharing the chore with NBC, added about 6.4 million households to that total. The A.C. Nielsen Co., which tracks ratings and audience share for cable and over-the-air broadcasters alike, will not have the full cable results until sometime next week, but CNN estimates its gavel-to-gavel coverage played to an average of 1.8 million households.
Combine that with the network audience, and it already surpasses the 1988 network audience for the convention-and that`s without counting in the other cable channels who covered it this year.
The networks are cutting back, but it isn`t really because of lack of audience. It`s because constantly growing competition is cutting into their combined base, stealing the numbers and driving advertisers to more lucrative mass audience programs.
In national network ratings for the four days coverage of the convention, ABC won, marginally.
But compared with what the networks score for a week of prime-time entertainment, its numbers were abysmal. The rating and share for ABC was 6.9 and 12; CBS, 5.7 and 10; and NBC, 5.6 and 10.
But, PBS, covering the convention for the first time, more than doubled its ratings over the same time period of last year, scoring a rating of 4.0 and share of 7.
A single Nielsen rating point represents 921,000 households and a share is the percentage of television sets tuned in.
Joe Peyronnin, deputy to CBS News president Eric Ober, defended his network`s decision to reduce convention coverage and said it may dwindle even more.
”I think the networks provided proper and ample coverage for a convention that was non-controversial and only slightly newsworthy,” he said. ”I believe if nothing is done (by political parties to spice up the events), in four more years you`ll find less and less network time devoted to live coverage.”
In Chicago, Dave Mayber, sales manager at NBC affiliate WMAQ-Ch.5, said he hopes so.
”If anything, network coverage hurts us because we have decreased ratings those nights,” Mayber said. ”The dropoff is anywhere from 30 to 50 percent and with that drop in viewers, it`s hard to sell advertising at a premium rate.”
CNN and C-Span, and other cable channels, who got into convention coverage this year, don`t see it that way. They say they`ll be back.
