Patterico beat us to a post about the Los Angeles Times’ Channel Island columnn yesterday, where Scott Collins turned a piece about Fox News Channel’s declining ratings into extended sniping about the network.

Patterico rightly points out that if Collins is going to tar FNC as too partisan, stale, or unengaged, what about CNN, whose ratings decline was far worse? If both leading cable news networks saw a decline, is the issue really FNC? Or something broader?

But Collins made a bigger mistake — he hung his hat on the wrong data. And — deliberately or not — he used the numbers that made FNC look the worst.

Compare Collins’ piece to a summary of the same news in trade paper Media Week (emphasis ours):

Collins used the Nielsen data for 1) prime time 2) 25-54 year olds to make his case. Not full-day. Not all adults.

25-54 is important to advertisers, since they’re convinced that is the demographic that buys everything. And advertisers prefer prime time because of its larger audiences. But people aged 25-54 watching during prime time aren’t the electorate. If Collins wants to talk about voter dissatisfaction, then he needs to look at the ratings for all adults.

But gosh, it’s hard to argue that FNC’s ratings drop is tied to their presumed partisanship / poor news judgement / stale packaging when their full day viewers actually fell only 5%, and CNN’s dropped four times as much — by 22%.

Collins’ piece sounds like a tribute to fellow LAT columnist / blogger Michael Hiltzik, who we caught a month ago selectively using data to ‘prove’ that right-side blogger / radio host Hugh Hewitt’s web traffic was in free fall. Hiltzik used this as a proxy for the decline of an entire political movement. In fact, Hewitt’s traffic was status quo. Of course, Hiltzik didn’t let that get in the way of a chance to bash his ideological opposites.

And Collins? He ignored the overall year-over-year drop in cable news audience as an explanatory factor. He used a subset of the data — the bits that put Fox in the worst possible light — and didn’t explain that to the readers. And then he threw out hypotheses that may fit preconceptions about Fox, but that can’t explain the far worse performance of CNN.

Yes, it is a column, not a news piece. But we’re pretty sure even LAT columnists are still supposed to make coherent arguments.

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The April-to-April decline could be because April 2005 was a big news month (Collins cites FNC arguing this). We also think cable TV news is feeling the effect of free news on the internet even more than print newspapers. The 25-54 numbers drop more than the overall audience because younger cable TV news viewers are moving to the internet for their news. News has always had the highest average audience age in cable — soon there won’t be any 25-54 (well, 25-40) year olds watching.

For a chart of CNN/FNC/MSNBC ratings over the last several years, go here. Has FNC leveled off? Yes. But they still have a substantial — almost 2x — lead over left-leaning CNN.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 4:11 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.