John Doyle
The Globe and Mail
Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2010
In the past few days, as people prattled on about the retirement of Lloyd Robertson, the arrival of Lisa LaFlamme as CTV’s news anchor and a looming news-anchor announcement by Global, I was often told that nobody is watching TV these days. This opinion was usually delivered with some delight.
The main reason for certain parties to assert that TV is dead is pretty clear. During the first week of July, the U.S. networks had the fewest prime-time viewers in two decades. According to Nielsen data, CBS averaged 5.6 million viewers, NBC, 4.7 million, ABC, 4.5 million and Fox, 4.1 million.
About the same time, The New York Times reported that ratings for the U.S. network news shows were down for the second quarter of this year. Both ABC and CBS had record low numbers for their evening news programs. Even NBC, which has led in the supper-time news race for several years, had historic low numbers.
These two news items were widely and gleefully reported online. Well, of course. Any time old media are shown to suffer, online news sources high-five each other and predict the imminent death of newspapers, TV, magazines and, for all I know, the use of pens and pencils worldwide. Continue reading