By comparison, here in the UK where I am, BBC News 24 is the most popular news channel with around 6.8 million viewers tuned in, compared to Sky News (Fox’s sister station) with about 4.6 million viewers. Fox News? Just 272,000 viewers over the course of the week.

I think the ‘reach’ figures can sometimes be more telling than the straight forward programme numbers.

And both CNN and HN have many credible news programs. But sadly, MSNBC has basically alienated half of the country with their tactics, by excluding conservative POVs from virtually every program (except for Tucker, and Abrams at times).

That’s not fair. Spud does a pretty good job maintaining a balance. I think the thing that obscures that is that a lot of the commentators are like SHANE.
, someone not looking for a honest discussion, someone just blinded by ideology. That’s not Spuds fault.

fact: cnn has more eyeballs watching it, it’s just they get the info the want and leave. fnc is for people who want the ‘news’ given in entertainment format. sorry i tune to to a news channel to be informed NOT to be entertained.

Look their are a lot of reasons to criticize Fox. Unbalanced panels, When did you start beating your wife type questions, the downright fusion of news and opinion, but they’re unfortunately not the only network who has descended into tabloid crap. Take a look at Headline News, the content is absolutely atrocious. Hell even CNN can’t help but cut to O.J. Simpson pressers. Fox may be leading the charge into the much, but the rest are right behind.

What bugs me, what genuinely vexes me is that there is no one agreed upon set of data to benchmark success among the networks. Or the advertisers. Or Nielsen. Which is why you have networks touting various sets of numbers, not all of them meshing with each other perfectly all the time. What we get in terms of data is only part of the story. That’s the problem as I see it. The only people who know the whole story are the nets’ research people. And you won’t be hearing from them because it’s not in their interest to reveal the process. And the trades like nice easily digestible numbers which is the antithesis of ratings theory as applied to advertising.

For me, I look at ratings not because I care who gets what, but because it’s interesting to how they get them. I like looking at the difference between the Live and Live + because, I like seeing that CNN gets X amount of viewers daily more than Fox yet Fox gets X amount of average viewers more than CNN. I like trying to figure out why that is.

That is an eminently fair question and one that has consumed me the past few weeks and not just for the reason you mention (I do think the FnF data is more valid than CUME because the Live data was at least used to sell to advertisers). I don’t have an answer to that question yet.

BS.

If they aren’t talking points then why are you posting them at all? Why did you post about F&F beating the Early Show in a few markets? We’re not ad sales agents. We don’t need to know the ratings. So why would you post them?