What's News? For Americans It's Not What You Think

The Axios analysis is reasonable enough. After surfeiting on a three-ring circus masquerading as a presidency, Americans are worn out. Donald Trump's demagoguery hasn't tuckered them totally -- the January 6^th Committee's hearings so far average better than 12 million viewers. But a post-Trump slump isn't the only reason for declining attention to events affecting the country and the world. The news, the analysts say, is delivering too much of a bad thing.

That conclusion, too, makes sense up to a point. Inflation, recession fears, a Supreme Court veering radically right, war in Ukraine and COVID variants that won't go away: The world's downers might not appeal as much as an escape to sports or celebrities on trial. The disinterest isn't only evident on broadcast and cable. People are googling the news less, as reflected in data from social media, news apps and search engine tallies on the subjects they seek out.

Swings in the stats, of course, have happened before. Americans generally tune out after election campaigns. That was the case last year, according to Nielson. Cable networks took the biggest hits. Primetime viewership for CNN and Fox dropped 33 percent, while broadcast networks saw their viewers fall by low double-digit percentages as well. 2022 continues the trend. Cable news viewers are down on average 19 percent in prime time compared to 2021.

But statistics, however fine-grained, only present an approximation of what's on people's minds. For one thing, not everyone behaves alike. Contrast the drop in viewers for the manically liberal MSNBC vs. the bump up in audiences for the hyper-rightwing Fox News. Notwithstanding billion-dollar lawsuits for peddling the big lie's nonsense about Venezuelans fixing voting machines, Fox's prime time propagandists still are pulling in their loyal crowds.

Interpreting interest in news online also is more complicated than tote sheets can portray. Recent findings by Piano, a tech company that builds paywalls, gives evidence why. Take its numbers on news sites. Piano reports that 33 percent of people who subscribe to digital news sites cancel within a day. Among the reasons the company offers: Many may well like one article but not the site. Small wonder. With news sites folding almost as fast as they launch, their ephemeral existence and content offer little reason to stick around.

And that's the point that deserves attention. Before poring over what the audience metrics mean for CNN or Vice.com, it makes sense to ask, what do Americans think is "news"? It's not a trick question, or one that media bosses are ignoring. In at least one case, they appear to be changing the definition of the word. Among his dictates at CNN, Chris Licht, the network's new chief, reportedly has given instructions to dial back advocacy on camera, rather than continuing to try to out orate Rupert Murdoch's kennel of Josef Goebbels wannabes on Fox.

How much Licht will change CNN's product by titrating its reporting and rhetoric remains to be seen; so does whether viewers will notice, or even care. A 2020 survey by the Rand Corporation, a think tank, found that broadcast and cable news came out on top for "reliability" in reporting news. But people surveyed were evenly split on the quality of what they saw: 44 percent said the news was as reliable as in the past; 41 percent said it was less. In other words, close to half said news on their self-declared, go-to source was heading downhill.

More telling, when it comes to whether reliability is important, the Rand survey suggests the answer for many news consumers is, not so much. Indeed, one-third of Rand's respondents said they knowingly used news sources that were less reliable, such as social media and content sent by peers. "We have to consider that some people are looking to news platforms as a means of entertainment," Michael Pollard, Rand researcher and the study's author, explained. "If this is the case, then finding a trustworthy or reliable source doesn't necessarily matter."

Pollard is onto something, and he's not alone. A Knight Foundation study in 2017 called into question the relevance of audience measurement methods after exploring Gen Z's trust in social over mainstream media and its amorphous definition of "news." This month, researchers from Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School, and Microsoft fingered television, not social media, for segregating Americans into silos where what they see as "news" rarely if ever contends with conflicting views.

The study, published in Science Advances, analyzed billions of online browsing as well as television viewing events over three years. "Television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans," the authors conclude. "Television news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diet month-over-month" as well as "to concentrate on (their) preferred sources." And the researchers added, "the audiences of partisan news channels are growing even as the TV news audience shrinks."

What's "news"? It's a relevant question. For Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal, which own the news silos, it's also a civic one. "Partisan segregation among the news audiences buffers many Americans from countervailing views, posing a threat to democracy," the Stanford, Annenberg, and Microsoft research team writes. As the executives at the media giants examine their news networks' latest viewer numbers, perhaps they'll contemplate what they've created on the way to the bank.

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