Few TV Reports on Audience Flight

Newspapers sell fewer copies than they used to, and network television news draws fewer viewers. But as that trend unfolded, newspapers and television gave starkly different accounts, a University of Pennsylvania study released last week shows. Papers found a lot to report about declining news audiences, while national television news shows had little to say. And though the problems of print and broadcast have been similar in scope, both media dwelled primarily on what was happening to newspapers. "The television networks have basically not been very interested in talking about television's problems," said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the university's Annenberg School of Communication and one of the study's authors. The authors combed through reports from 2000 through early 2009 from 26 major newspapers, the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, and the prime-time lineups of CNN, CNBC, Fox News and MSNBC. In the newspapers, they found 900 articles about the drop in newspaper circulation and 95 about the shrinking audience for the broadcast networks' newscasts. The TV news shows had 38 reports on falling newspaper readership and only 6 about the falling audience for national news broadcasts.