Somewhere into the old maxim about lies, damn lies and statistics, one ought to be able to shoehorn television ratings. Networks and stations can do amazing things with A.C. Nielsen’s little numbers to prove to advertisers that their outlet is, indeed, the best way to reach house-proud housewives in their mid-40s with medical anxieties on Tuesday nights in November.
So we decided, in offering this tableau of what news Chicagoans watch, to set aside all the hairsplitting. These numbers, individually, represent intact hairs, as it were, averages for total weekday viewers derived from one or several sweeps months, and the charts, collectively, represent the whole ‘do.
While the result may look like the bastard stepchild of the TV listing and the sports agate pages, it is actually full of telling detail.
Much of what it tells is very bad news for cable news, which gets reams of publicity but doesn’t have one show whose Chicago audience is large enough to fill Wrigley Field.
It is a bummer for network and local news, too, in a way: Most broadcasts have been hemorrhaging viewers over the past decade, although, with the exception of Dan Rather’s fading CBS newscast, their popularity relative to the competition remains strong. The exception is Chicago’s 9 p.m. news hours, islands of ratings stability, even growth.
It challenges the local TV-news-executive mantra that, yes, we are losing evening viewers, but we’re gaining them in the morning.
And, big picture, it suggests that there is simply more news supply than there is demand. Some very solid television programs draw virtually no audience, and some mediocre ones are unable to make headway against just-as-mediocre ones. A shakeout is probably inevitable.
This, remember, is all in Chicago, with a nationwide reputation as a very good news town. Here, Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” routinely beats Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show.”
It should be stated that individual outlets have quibbles with breaking down the ratings by individual show, especially those whose very small audiences challenge the limits of the Nielsen statistical sample.
But this story deals with what exists, however imperfect. It’s the system used by TV stations and advertisers alike. And as much as we’d like to provide every news provider’s response to every underwhelming number, readers wouldn’t stand for it and there simply isn’t room.
Cable: Heat or hype?
Probably the most striking fact in this set of statistics is the illustration of a complaint that television networks have been making for years: that we in the media write way too much about cable news.
At 6 p.m. weekdays in the Chicago area, the audience for all the national cable news programs combined can’t equal the viewership of PBS’ stodgy old “NewsHour.” Way up ahead, like an Olympic miler facing a Sunday jogger, are the numbers that the local news stations draw at the same time, or that the national newscasts do in the preceding half-hour.
The same is true at 7 p.m., where WTTW-Ch. 11’s newsmagazine “Chicago Tonight” not only kicks Bill O’Reilly’s booty but that of all the national cable channels combined.
The most popular evening cable program is O’Reilly’s hour of argument at 7 p.m., with 36,250 average viewers over the last four major sweeps months. By contrast, the least popular broadcast news program after 6 p.m. is WMAQ-Ch. 5’s “NBC 5 Chicago News at 6,” with 186,000 viewers.
The least popular evening cable program is CLTV’s “Chicagoland News at 6:30,” with 3,000.
That last is not a misprint: 3,000 viewers, the student population of one midsize high school, in a market with 3.4 million television homes, 68 percent of which are wired for cable.
But the schedule for CLTV (part of Tribune Publishing) is not alone in being full of sub-10,000 audiences. CNBC and MSNBC don’t do much better here.
Big names, small audiences
CNBC shows “The News With Brian Williams” at 6 p.m. nightly, a solid informational hour drawing on the resources of NBC News and anchored by the anointed heir to Tom Brokaw at the big network. All that firepower lures just 6,625 Chicagoans to the set.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, parodied endlessly on “Saturday Night Live”? Fewer than 10,000 viewers tune in for his “Hardball” (in any of the time slots his show has aired during the periods surveyed here), which means his biggest audience, by far, is in comic imitation.
CNN’s Larry King, a broadcasting icon, talks to celebrities? 33,000 viewers.
Another legend doing poorly in Chicago is Dan Rather. He’s part of a genre, the network evening newscast, that has collectively gone from May 1993’s 22.4 rating — which is to say, 22.4 percent of the total area homes with televisions — to this past May’s 15.1.
That’s despite the fact there were five extra ratings points to be had this year, based on Nielsen’s measurement of households using television in the time period.
The falloff for Rather’s “CBS Evening News” has been steeper. His program dropped from a 6.3 rating in ’93 to a 2.2 this past May.
And the CBS newscast is also the only one of the big three here that has fewer viewers than the local newscast leading into it. Rather loses 1,600 people, while both Tom Brokaw at NBC and the dominant Peter Jennings at ABC pick up roughly 40,000 viewers.
Morning blues
The numbers are grimmer still for CBS in the morning, where its “Early Show” has struggled to make a mark against NBC’s “Today” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” broadcasts.
WBBM-Ch. 2, the local CBS station, has sent a paltry 48,100 viewers into the “Early Show” over the last four sweeps periods. And 40 percent of them have turned away, leaving “Early Show” with a viewership number only cable news could love: 27,700.
By contrast, the morning efforts of Fox’s WFLD-Ch. 32 and, especially, WGN-Ch. 9 (owned, like this newspaper, by Tribune Co.) make a strong argument for localism. “Fox News in the Morning” comes close to the viewership for NBC superstar Katie Couric and her “Today” cohorts. WGN’s “Morning News” defeats it handily.
Neither, to be sure, approaches the 235,000 viewers drawn by ABC’s “Good Morning America,” another sign of the continued strength of WLS, which, despite some slippage at 10 p.m., continues to dominate the local news scene and help its network dominate the national news in Chicago.
The cable stations, in the morning, fare as poorly as they do at night.
Morning gains?
There has been, in the past decade, an increase in Chicagoans watching local morning news, at least as measured in the 6 a.m. hour that precedes the start of the national telecasts.
In May 1993, 13.1 percent of Chicago households watched between 6-7 a.m., on average. This past May, it was 16.3 percent.
But in that time, two stations, WGN and WFLD, began offering news in that hour.
A more direct comparison points to stasis. 1997’s was the first May in which all five of the stations provided 6-7 a.m. news, and their combined rating was a 16.1, or just below the recent 16.3.
This suggests news executives shouldn’t be sanguine about losing viewers from the marquee nighttime newscasts in the belief those losses are being made up elsewhere.
Among the old Big Three Network stations, which broadcast their late news at 10 p.m., the nighttime losses have been profound.
The collective audience for news at 10 has dropped, between May 1993 and May 2003, from 47 percent of local households to 26.9 percent, a 43 percent decline.
The standard response from the stations is to blame the burgeoning of cable, the addition of so many more outlets where people can get their news before 10.
If you add up all the viewers for cable news programming between 6-10 p.m., it is significant, more than 250,000 people, just about what the distantthird-place newscast of CBS-owned WBBM draws at 10 p.m.
Merely a number
But that 250,000 figure is just raw addition. It doesn’t try to separate out how many of those people are individual viewers versus one guy who, for instance, stays with Fox News Channel the whole night and gets counted with four separate programs.
Plus, only little-watched CLTV among the cable providers is working in the same, local-news field as WLS, WMAQ and WBBM. A viewer of CNN, in theory, should then want to switch over to the locals at 10 p.m. precisely because they are local.
Yet even with those caveats, the audience loss in 10 p.m. local news clearly cannot solely be attributed to cable.
The late newscasts have lost 20 rating points in a decade, and, in the most generous interpretation, only about 5 of those points could be assigned to cable.
Surprisingly stable, by contrast, has been the viewership for the two 9 p.m. newscasts, from Fox-owned WFLD and Tribune-owned WGN. WGN moved from a 6 rating in May 1993 to a 5.7 this past May, while WFLD has climbed from a 4 to a 5.7 over the same period.
And furthermore . . .
Readers will find their own tidbits in these charts, but here are a few final points to make:
The most popular regular show on CLTV, by a wide margin, is not one of its signature newscasts but the 9 p.m. “Sports Page” show.
Bill O’Reilly’s repeat at 10 p.m. does better than any other show on Fox News Channel except 5 p.m.’s “Special Report With Brit Hume.” And it almost beats Hume.
Chicago, a town with a strong history of local morning radio deejays, turns up its nose at MSNBC’s simulcast of Don Imus’ New York-based radio program. He draws just 3,000 viewers here.
Tom Brokaw and NBC win the national news ratings battle, but WLS’ strength means Peter Jennings and ABC almost double the NBC numbers in Chicago.
