Broadcast Viewership Hits Record Low

Americans avoided television in historic levels over the past week. CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox together had the smallest number of primetime viewers last week in two decades of record-keeping, the Nielsen Co. said. Given the dominance of the big broadcasters before then, you'd probably have to go back to the early days of television to find such a collective shrug. Together, the four networks averaged 18.9 million viewers last week, Nielsen said. During the season, "American Idol" alone usually gets a bigger audience than that.