DEADLINE: So for you, other outlets especially the cable news networks do center on just one segment of the political spectrum in their reporting?
PELLEY: Certainly. It’s no surprise. Fox is associated with the right and MSNBC is associated with the left and they’ve done that because it is a business model. It’s a strategy. They’ve decided to bite off one small part of the viewership and be happy with that 200,000 viewers, 300,000 viewers that they have. But when you are talking to 7 million viewers across the country, man you have got to represent everybody’s views and have got to give them the impression that you are being as honest as you know how to be.
PELLEY: Certainly. It’s no surprise. Fox is associated with the right and MSNBC is associated with the left and they’ve done that because it is a business model. It’s a strategy. They’ve decided to bite off one small part of the viewership and be happy with that 200,000 viewers, 300,000 viewers that they have. But when you are talking to 7 million viewers across the country, man you have got to represent everybody’s views and have got to give them the impression that you are being as honest as you know how to be.
DEADLINE: While the news flow on cable may be in the hundreds of thousands, a lot of people are watching Bill O’Reilly, a couple of million a night. Same thing with Hannity.
PELLEY: We measure our audience in millions. They’re not big numbers. People talk about cable a lot and cable has a very high profile. Not a lot of people watch cable news, they just don’t. If you look at the Nielsen numbers, the cable channels have a few hundred thousand viewers at any given moment. The CBS Evening News again has 7 million viewers, ABC has 8 million viewers. Brian [NBC's Williams] has almost 9 million. Altogether we have about 25 million viewers on any given night. That’s a very different order of magnitude.
As the author of this article pointed out, it has been a very long time since any of these shows got 9 million viewers, or that they together got 25 million. Pelley, as usual for a MSM talking head, is grossly misinformed. PELLEY: We measure our audience in millions. They’re not big numbers. People talk about cable a lot and cable has a very high profile. Not a lot of people watch cable news, they just don’t. If you look at the Nielsen numbers, the cable channels have a few hundred thousand viewers at any given moment. The CBS Evening News again has 7 million viewers, ABC has 8 million viewers. Brian [NBC's Williams] has almost 9 million. Altogether we have about 25 million viewers on any given night. That’s a very different order of magnitude.
Fox's actual ratings here.
And a personal comment on Scott Pelley. For years, I've been irritated by the way all MSM talking heads speak on TV. They all have an odd, slow, deliberate cadence as they talk, as if they are speaking to children. There is a tendency to break sentences up into phrases, as if a whole thought might be too much for their audience to understand. Once noticed, this affectation becomes more and more irritating, and for me it has come to the point that I just can't watch these rubes anymore.
Scott Pelley is the extreme of this style. As he stares out of the TV, with that condescending half smile, more than anything else he seems to act as if he is talking to a five year old with a learning disability. Everything is said very slowly, with phrases rather than complete sentences most of the time. It's simply impossible not to be first distracted, and then irritated to the point that I turn off the TV. Watch him next time, and see if you notice the condescending manner.
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