What if No one is Watching
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television What if No One Is Watching? By Reuven Frank A broadcasting network is not a tangible object; it is a contractual arrangement. A corporation holding a license from the...
...No one...
...But at the moment the demonstrators were shouting, "The whole world is watching," the only ones tuned in were the technicians in the mobile units, too busy turning knobs to pay heed...
...During 2002 the median age of those watching ABC's Peter Jennings increased from 57 to 59...
...Not on television...
...Actually, there is another airing three hours later for the Pacific time zone...
...is safe...
...Underlying the conflicts is the consensus that commercial broadcast TV is on its downward slope: Everyone has to make as much money as possible before things hit bottom...
...The tape is a tape...
...the change for CBS' Dan Rather was from 59 to 61...
...In microcosm, one might say, the basic problem is being played out more immediately on the news front...
...More important, the station sells its own commercials to air during and between the national programs...
...Charges included hyping the reporting, keeping it on when there was nothing new to say (that is, most of the time), and worst of all, heightening the pressure on law enforcement officials...
...Like all such prophets, she is probably forecasting doom for tomorrow that will not arrive until the day after...
...Until fairly recently, though, FCC regulations did not permit any corporation to own more than five affiliates, so these were clustered in the biggest markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc...
...If the offender were a newspaper the reader would criticize, say, the New York Times, or USA Today...
...It is merely part of the jockeying to maintain profitability in an everchanging television environment...
...The network is also responsible for distributing its schedule to affiliates...
...The vacant 10-11 p.m...
...Fox News' peak viewership was slightly larger than 2 million, CNN's was more than 1.5 million, and MSNBC's topped 600,000, addingup to alittleover4.5 million...
...William Powers of the National journal, a knowledgeable and usually insightful observer of American media, pleaded for a policy of facts only, with "no filler, no banter, no sanctimony, no poetry, no speculation, and please, please, please no off-the-cuff opinion...
...The difference was dramatically demonstrated again during last fall's reaction to the coverage of the search for the D.C...
...In the early years, too, many airwave licenses were granted to local newspapers in the belief that they would best serve the community...
...In the same period Internet use is up by almost one-third, suggesting the time may be at hand for looking to various long possible video-on-demand alternatives largely ignored by adults reared on so-called "appointment" television ("Is West Wing on tonight...
...slot would be devoted to local news...
...It was indeed a notably silly exercise...
...At first this was done via telephone lines leased from AT&T...
...Meanwhile Diane Mermigas, in her regular column in the trade newspaper Electronic Media, warns that both sides are ignoring the drop in total audience— broadcast and cable together—plus other important trends...
...The following week the Fox network, which normally ranks fourth, except when broadcasting the World Series, canceled an expensive new drama series because its audience had slipped to barely 5 million—or, to belabor the obvious, more than the grand total for all-news cable on its runner-up best day of the year...
...over dividing up commercial time during morning shows...
...In the 1960s the FCC decreed that a daily could not own a station in its home city, but waived the law for existing owners...
...In December the season's final episode of The Sopranos was seen on almost 13 million sets—despite its being presented on HBO, a premium price service reaching roughly one-third of American homes...
...The station receives in return a small percentage of the network's income from advertisers on its shows...
...EST, Tom Brokaw brought in 9 million...
...A reel in a heavy metal box is then delivered to a playback machine in New York or Los Angeles and, at a specified time, is shown by affiliates everywhere simultaneously...
...National programs are usually videotaped as a complete unit...
...No one was watching...
...Leaving aside some crisis, the combined audience for the networks' evening newscasts is getting smaller—and older...
...In 1952theTV station of the San Francisco Chronicle had no news department worthy of the name...
...On the day John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo were captured...
...Consider even the biggest all-news audience in 2002, on last November's midterm Election Night: Fox News, 2.2 million, CNN, 1.9 million and MSNBC, 745,000—together nearly 4.9 million...
...Videotapes of the battles between the police and demonstrators later made it to the national broadcasts and had a real effect on the public, and indeed on history...
...Cable television is hailed for its appeal to "niche" groups...
...A typical complaint: Television, betraying its liberal bias and its tendentious search for suffering people, gives us a distorted picture of poverty in Africa...
...When the unspeakable Bill O'Reilly is especially egregious, other commentators will say what a shame it is that the American public is subjected to him...
...Cameras were recording what was happening, but Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley had arranged matters with his tame unions to prevent any live transmission...
...The news magazines are going in the same direction, as are the all-news cable channels...
...The whole system is time-honored, although advancing technology has sapped its logic...
...The aggregate ratings for the beginning of the 2002-03 season, Mermigas notes, are down 3 per cent from the previous year...
...The recent decline in basic subscribers in cable's mature universes underscores that not even cable...
...The whole world is watching" is a slogan everyone has accepted as true since it was first uttered by the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators dogging the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago...
...For that reason as well as historical ones, networks own some stations...
...In December the Hearst media empire's television division added fuel to the fire by proposing to ABC, where it is the second largest owner of affiliates (12), that the network's prime time slate be cut from 22 hours a week to 15...
...Only Hannity & Colmes and The ? 'Reilly Factor, both on Fox News, are up in viewership and down in age...
...A corporation holding a license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to send a signal at a given frequency in a given locality—a station—contracts with a larger corporation that produces or purchases a substantial body of programs—a network— to transmit a significantportion of its material...
...Today some newspaper publishers own stations by the dozen, and each of the oldnetworks owns between30 and 40...
...Centralized satellite delivery survives because that's what the networks prefer...
...They still fall well short of the broadcast networks, but not always...
...the more popular those are, the greater its revenue...
...As a general rule, stations are more profitable and less risky than networks...
...The networks have interests on both sides of these quarrels, leaving logical minds confused...
...the Chicago Tribune's station, however, became a powerhouse and the core of a communications empire...
...TV journalists, it was alleged, were unwisely passing hints to the malefactors— who were presumed to have their feet up in some hotel room watching TV—and adding to the panic that had descended on the Washington suburbs...
...Who else would lay down the money for the 10 failures that precede each success...
...Rather 7.3 milUonandJennings6.7...
...Of course, if networks did not exist another system would have evolved, but they do...
...This has sometimes been true, sometimes not...
...So journalists, too, a far less sophisticated breed than they like to profess, see something on cable and react as if it were being seen everywhere...
...When the Big Three networks finally turned to the voting results, at 10 p.m...
...Apparently young people like Right-wing tantrums...
...The fallacy is best illustrated by audience size...
...sniper (or, as it turned out, snipers...
...Still, she is right in insisting the medium's moguls are turning a blind eye to technological and viewer changes...
...over how much national programming must be carried, and so forth...
...Nevertheless, Mermigas concludes, "Broadcast- and cable-related companies continue to go through their age-old exercises even as the ground beneath their feet fractures into hundreds of niche pieces...
...There is, in fact, one niche that watches—or at least keeps on—all-news cable all the time: the media...
...Their children—who used computers in schools where their parents used calculators (and some of their grandparents used slide rules)—are another story...
...Big name pundits blanketed the country's Op-Ed pages with cries that television was giving us "All Sniper, All The Time...
...They are comfortable with digital video recorders that can, first, skip commercials (never mind the threat to the medium's economic base), and second, allow them to schedule what they want to see and when...
...It should further be pointed out that several cable entertainment outlets draw more viewers than the news variety...
...Now communications satellites are the chosen vehicles, resulting in a cat's cradle of video signals in the sky...
...Since they get the scripts written, assemble and rehearse the casts, and have the shows performed before a live audience, the affiliates are not about to complain...
...The misguided implication running through the criticism, however, was that TV was subjecting the entire United States to this nonsense...
...Another factor that makes television unique is the way the casual viewer feels everyone is tuned in to the same thing...
...But he was watching all-news cable— specifically Fox News—while addressing himself to all of television...
...That proved to be television's most watched breaking news story in 2002, but as it unfolded the medium was roundly denounced...
...In every newspaper city room and in the editor's office, in every local TV station newsroom and broadcast network news bureau, sets displaying CNN, Fox News and MSNBC are never turned off...
...stations in the Rocky Mountain region can choose either one...
...The locals keep expressing discontent— over helping to pay for sports rights...
...The networks say they need the hour because the more prime time they have, the more likely they are to find the big hits that drive TV Several other large station groups support the Hearst scheme, but at the moment no one expects it to happen soon...
...If he approves of what he sees, and especially if he disapproves, he will credit, or blame, "television...
...But all those rules have either been rescinded or enfeebled by lack of enforcement...
...Most objectionable, they said, was the cable channels' practice of filling up hours with a strange array of selfdeclared experts...
...Hearst also controls the second largest number of NBC affiliates (10...
...There, too, the world was not watching...
Vol. 86 • January 2003 • No. 1
