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http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8251First point about the attention that’s being paid: An ABC representative took to The New York Times (July 28) to brag that the network had made the right -- that is, the commercially correct -- call in deciding to cut convention coverage to the bone. “The figures released Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research,” wrote Neil A. Lewis and Bill Carter, “suggest that the number of total viewers for the Democratic convention's first night fell to about 13.5 million this year from about 17 million four years ago.”
But hold on. Two paragraphs later, Lewis and Carter wrote, “Viewing on the cable news channels showed a big increase, with about two million more viewers watching this year's first-day coverage than did four years ago.” And then, “PBS, the one broadcast network that has continued to provide gavel-to-gavel coverage, also experienced a sharp rise in viewers … an average of 2.5 million viewers for the three hours of opening night coverage, compared with 1.9 million four years ago.”
Meanwhile, in some areas, ABC added a digital channel, also sent out on the Web, for those who take their convention coverage neat. No figures are forthcoming for that.
Apparently no figures exist for C-SPAN’s wall-to-wall coverage in 2000 or 2004, either.
Meanwhile, cable-news networks totaled 4.7 million on Monday night, up from 2.7 million in 2000.
Let’s do some arithmetic. Leaving ABC digital and C-SPAN aside, the first-night total TV audience added up to 20.7 million, compared with 21.6 million in 2000. This represents a decline (again, not allowing for the possibility of a compensatory uptick in C-SPAN’s audience) of a grand 4 percent -- not exactly what was implied in the Los Angeles Times headline “TV Ratings Dip Sharply From 2000.”
There may well be, as Lewis and Carter wrote, “a sharp decline in public interest in … scripted political events.” But the networks may still be guilty of self-fulfilling prophecies.
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