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CNN Still First in Cable News, Depending on What You Mean By "Cable News"

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: October 28, 2009 / 10:09 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

After seeing a few days ago that CNN had dropped to fourth place among cable news networks, even being deep-sixed by its sister channel HLN (once upon a time known as CNN Headline News), it occurred to me that the problem isn't with CNN, exactly -- it's with the definition of cable news. If you hold strictly to the definition of "cable news," CNN is still first because it has no competition; the other channels may have started as cable news channels, but now a new term should be created for them. Maybe political opinion channels?

Without getting too wonky about the numbers -- there are many more I could point to -- here are the average viewers in primetime so far in October for the 25-to-54 demo:

Fox News: 689,000
MSNBC: 250,000
HLN: 221,000
CNN: 202,000.

As long as we define all of these as being cable news channels, CNN's so-called competition is the right wing Fox News, the leftist MSNBC, and the tabloidy HLN, which now not only sports Nancy Grace, but Joy Behar, as one of its stars. But it should be clear to anyone who follows the cable news category that, by this point, CNN is the only one wholly committed to the news business, and unfortunately that is a different, less lucrative business than the one the others are because what it does is time-sensitive and relatively apolitical. (Well, except for Lou Dobbs.)

Being in the news business means that CNN has to sit around waiting for news -- it doesn't have to be serious news -- to actually compete with its so-called competition, and then things get better. I looked up what CNN's ratings were three months ago -- when the big story, as you might recall, was the death of Michael Jackson. Sure enough, CNN was second in primetime behind Fox News for July, beating MSNBC by 57 percent in the 25-to-54 demo and by 48 percent in total viewers. Much of this was due, of course, to Larry King, who was recently, and oh-so-accurately, termed "America's Grief Counselor" by Vanity Fair's James Wolcott. Since that time, it seems like everything that has qualified as news has surrounded the healthcare debate, with perhaps a smattering of what to do in Afghanistan, both of them highly politicized things to yack on and on about, but not, on a day-to-day basis, actually news.

The problem for CNN is that there's no real solution here, except for praying for more hot news stories. If the category would be reframed, which it should be, it would be a different matter.

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