A Supernova Moment For Cable News

Read most of the commentary on the TV industry these days and you’d think that Nielsen ratings were a quaint holdover from earlier times, something as antiquated as a blu-ray DVD and just as irrelevant.

Which in many ways they are, only how to explain all the recent spate of headlines about cable news networks and their obsession with ratings.

CNN, which has been struggling with their ratings, has been trying to right the ship, bringing in a new leader while looking to new voices and new strategies to increase their ratings.

Meanwhile Fox is being hammered for its behavior around the 2020 election, where hosts and executives were shown to be far more concerned with ratings than with the truth.

So how does something so irrelevant continue to be so newsworthy?

It’s a question well worth pondering because the short answer is that change in the television industry is largely incremental and that for a huge chunk of the television industry, ratings are still hugely relevant.

Take cable news.

Yes, we can all snicker about how the average age of their viewing audience is 65+ and how the advertising is nothing but death-and-diarrhea screeds from pharma companies. 

The thing is though, those pharma companies pay a lot of money to advertise on cable news—$1.68 billion in overall ad spend for 2022. 

So do a lot of other advertisers who feel that cable news is a great place to get their message across.

You know who else pays a lot for cable news networks? MVPDs and vMVPDs.

The fallout over AT&T and Newsmax notwithstanding, pay TV providers know that cable news is one of the only things tethering much of their audience to pay TV—it’s still one of the few things they can’t get from streaming.

The result is the carriage fees the news networks get are still quite hefty, even at a time of declining viewership. 

So there’s that and then there’s the fact that it’s easy to measure: cable news is pretty much only watched in real time. So no 7-day or 3-day windows. No DVRs. Just straight up overnights, the way things used to be. 

And it would be foolish to underestimate the degree of nostalgia that exists at many networks for the ways things used to be.

Finally there’s what you might call “the Twitter Effect.”

In that while Twitter’s user base has never been all that large, it’s like a digital Cheers for journalists and so what gets said on Twitter (or at least pre-Musk Twitter) got amplified in the media echo chamber.

Cable news is not all the different.

Reporters for various print- and Substack-based media are often called on by the cable news networks to contribute their opinions on breaking topics. They opine and then other journos opine on those opinions and the whole echo chamber just expands to include national cable news.

Ditto all manner of government officials from both parties for whom an interview or clip on cable news represents a form of validation.

Still, it’s valid to ask if this is cable news’s supernova moment, the brief period where they burn brightly before burning out.

That looks fairly likely, at least from where I’m sitting.

Younger audiences (and by “younger” we’re looking at people under 50 these days) get most of their news online. It’s easier, timelier and usually free.

The hypocrisies of the major cable news networks are becoming more and more glaring, ditto their tribalization, their role in creating echo chambers.

All of which serve to keep those “younger” audiences away from them.

Finally, there’s the fact that fewer and fewer people are watching linear TV these days, which means that those carriage fees are only going to head south. Without that sort of revenue stream, it will be hard to keep those networks, with their slew of high priced talent running profitably.

So the question then becomes how and how slowly do you move them online, where do you move them—FASTs or the SVOD services and how do you position them—as standalone apps or as part of a larger streaming app via the media companies that own them?

And what happens if Netflix decides its a good idea to launch their own 24 hour news service?

In all likelihood this is not a pressing question.

If the cable news networks start to lose money, it will be a long slow leak—think of something like AOL or MySpace, two companies that still maintained profitability and subscribers long after their early 00s heyday.

What the cable news networks will start to lose though, is relevance and that, more than anything will be their death knell.