Is something happening at CNN?

[Aeschines]

I keep seeing hints at conservative sites and whatnot, but I can’t find anything concrete via googling.

Is CNN having problems these days?

[Larry_Mudd]

There’s nothing at www.poynter.org , which suggests to me that the answer is “nothing of consequence.”

[EvilGhandi]

Yes something is happening at CNN.
What is happening at CNN is that it is now happening.
It may very well be the most happening channel of all the happening chanels.

[Mr.Blue_Sky]

@EvilGhandi

Yes something is happening at CNN.
What is happening at CNN is that it is now happening.
It may very well be the most happening channel of all the happening chanels.

I hate when that happens.

[Otto]

@Mr. Blue Sky

I hate when that happens.

What are ya gonna do? It’s happenstance.

[vetbridge]

shit happens.

[moriah]

It happens to be true.

[micco]

Apparently CNN has shown that money can buy happen-ness.

[Otto]

Can they buy it for a hapenny?

[GorillaMan]

I happen to know about the happening. If anyone happens across my blog, and happens to make it better known, I’d be happy.

[Larry_Mudd]

Enough with the haphazard replies to our hapless OP, alredy.

[Kent_Clark]

What’s happening is that CNN is getting pasted in the ratings by Fox News. No secret about that.

So what does any organization that’s having it’s lunch eaten by the competition do? They look to see what the competition is doing and try to figure out if they can improve/copy/steal it.

Does that mean CNN will move to more conservative programming? Who knows?

[BrainGlutton]

@kunilou

What’s happening is that CNN is getting pasted in the ratings by Fox News. No secret about that.

Well, yes and no. CNN has more viewers. Fox’s “ratings” are higher because it’s viewers spend more time each week watching – which, come to think of it, says something rather sad about them. Like Rush’s loyal cadre of “Dittoheads.” See http://www.fair.org/extra/0404/fox-ratings.html:

After exposure to countless similar stories published since January 2002, when Fox was reported to have surpassed CNN in the Nielsen ratings, one might naturally conclude that Fox has more viewers than CNN.

But it’s not true. On any given day, more people typically tune to CNN than to Fox.

So what are the media reports talking about? With few exceptions, stories about the media business report a single number for ratings (often expressed two different ways–as “points” or “share”). This number is often presented as if it were the result of a popularity contest or a democratic vote. But it is actually the average number of viewers watching a station or a show in a typical minute, based on Nielsen Media Research’s monitoring of thousands of households.

The average is arrived at by counting viewers every minute. Heavy viewers–those who tune in to a station and linger there–have a greater impact, as they can be counted multiple times as they watch throughout the day.

When an outlet reports that CNN is trailing Fox, they are almost invariably using this average tally, which Fox has been winning for the past two years. For the year 2003, Nielsen’s average daily ratings show Fox beating CNN 1.02 million viewers to 665,000.

But there is another important number collected by Nielsen (though only made available to the firm’s clients) that tells another story. This is the “cume,” the cumulative total number of viewers who watch a channel for at least six minutes during a given day. Unlike the average ratings number the media usually report, this number gives the same weight to the light viewer, who tunes in for a brief time, as it does to the heavy viewer.

How can CNN have more total viewers when Fox has such a commanding lead in average viewers? Conventional industry wisdom is that CNN viewers tune in briefly to catch up on news and headlines, while Fox viewers watch longer for the opinion and personality-driven programming. Because the smaller total number of Fox viewers are watching more hours, they show up in the ratings as a higher average number of viewers.

CNN regularly claims a cume about 20 percent higher than Fox’s (Deseret Morning News, 1/12/04). For instance, in April 2003, during the height of the fighting in Iraq, CNN’s cume was significantly higher than Fox’s: 105 million viewers tuned into CNN compared to 86 million for Fox (Cablefax, 4/30/03). But in the same period, the ratings reported by most media outlets had Fox in the lead, with an average of 3.5 million viewers to CNN’s 2.2 million.