Old People Love Cable News — and They Vote

Cable news was having a terrible 2023 even before it was half over. Don Lemon got sacked by CNN boss Chris Licht, and then Licht got the heave-ho himself after the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta scrutinized his short reign. Tucker Carlson, who fancied himself a veritable network within the Fox News Channel, got the same treatment after his patron, Rupert Murdoch, paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to vaporize its libel suit against Fox. Only MSNBC was spared the drama.

There was much more bad news to report. Ratings were down, prompting media analyst Alan Wolk to claim “Cable News Is Dying” and then-Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi to diagnose the business’ “looming existential crisis.” Financial Times columnist Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Richard J. Tofel, a former executive at the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, agreed, as did the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Christen Rosen. Even Carlson, now divorced from the medium that had made him a star, was detecting a “limited future” for cable.

These obituaries had been foreshadowed in a 2016 Atlantic feature by Derek Thompson, who stacked the causes of cable news’ demise like this as he predicted Fox’s fall: An approaching demographic cliff was going to swallow the network’s core of elderly white male viewers; cord-cutting was gaining steam and was destined to deplete cable news’ audience from another direction; and the evolution of new technologies would usher in the medium’s twilight.

But the recent predictions about the end of cable news are just as inaccurate as Thompson’s 2016 Fox prophecy. Cable news possesses phenomenal staying power, for reasons detailed below. It may well outlive its obituarists.

That’s particularly important as we head deeper into an election year since this audience — older and politically attuned — is an influential one to cultivate: They vote.

Older voters typically turn out in droves, and the last presidential election was no different. The Census Bureau found in 2020 that Americans ages 65 to 74 had the highest voter turnout at 76 percent. (The lowest turnout came from 18- to 24-year-olds at 51.4 percent.) Voter turnout also rose as age, education and income increased; well-off, older cable news watchers are a plum group for advertisers and cable operators. That means all the talking points sloshing through the tube are actually reaching voters; indeed, it means cable news will have an outsized impact on politics, not just in 2024, but for years to come.

The assertions of cable news’ vulnerability were not without evidence. Cable news’ audience was old and getting older — rapidly moving from their Barcaloungers to the cemetery. The scissoring of the cable cord was also real. Changing technology was giving the audience new choices. Obviously, cable news would have to adapt to survive.

“I don’t know in 10 years that the most effective way for people to consume news will be watching anchors, sitting behind desks, reading teleprompters,” says Andrew Morse, currently the president and publisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a former executive at CNN, Bloomberg News and ABC News.

If cable news were to buy the farm as so many predict, the consequences would be more dramatic than any of its harbingers of doom have plotted out. Before the arrival of MSNBC and Fox News in 1996, politics in America was mostly a regional and local endeavor, going national only in the 18 months preceding presidential campaign years. But by providing a constant national forum for Washington politics, cable news changed the focus for its audience. Backbenchers in Congress — people like Matt Gaetz — who were once ignored by the press, discovered that by going on cable news, they could acquire influence and build political power within their parties.

Cable has become the place that candidates toss their hats into the ring, where they launch trial balloons for new policies, where the debates that once took place in House and Senate chambers are now often conducted under studio lights, where evidence to impeach presidents is first presented, and where Supreme Court nominees are first vetted.

In many ways, cable news, especially MSNBC and Fox, have become the 21st century equivalents of the 19th century newspaper industry. Unlike those newspapers, they aren’t controlled by the parties, but they might as well be, as MSNBC plows left and Fox plows right.

You’re welcome to disparage the trend. Many do find it substandard as journalism. But like it or not, the partisan networks and the debates they host and amplify have given national politics a primacy they’ve never had before. Should the cable news networks expire, as the doomers say, it’s hard to imagine an outsider like Donald Trump would rise from political obscurity again. (Again, something many would count as a plus — but that would be a different story.) The parties would have to find other ways to engage supporters. The White House would no longer have a reliable 24/7 forum to dispense its positions. To put a crystal ball on it, the vanishing of cable news would likely dilute the parties’ influence and force partisans to explore other media and technology to share and spread their messages.

Yet the demographic claim that the cable news’ aged audience will die off goes only so far. As Los Angeles Times reporter Stephen Battaglio recently wrote, the median age of the CNN, Fox and MSNBC audiences is, respectively, 67, 68 and 71. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the industry. The 50-plus age group constitutes 43 percent of the television audience. While it’s true the older demographic’s days are numbered, nature has a way of replenishing its ranks by turning people in their late 40s into cable news-friendly senior citizens. According to the Census Bureau, the numbers of baby boomers in the over-65 category won’t start slowing until 2030, which will give the cable news business another decade to tinker with the formula before any demographic end game arrives. The demographic bulge of boomers may also explain why the median age of the cable news audience is old: There are just so many of them out there!

Serving older audiences comes with unexamined advantages. Older people are habit-prone, making them more likely than the young to keep their cable subscription instead of cord-cutting. They’re late adopters of new technology, happy to maintain their old tech until it breaks and are culturally resistant to shift their consumption to apps or other newer technology relative to younger audiences. By reliably paying their cable bills, they allow the cable companies to pay the cable news companies their licensing fees — cable news’ single greatest source of revenue.

Older people are also television’s most devoted viewers (just as the most devoted newspaper readers are over 50). A scientific study from 2010 tells us that those over 65 years of age watch three times as much TV as do young adults. Many older viewers regard television, especially cable news, as a companion who is there for them morning, noon or night. Discuss an older viewer’s favorite news channel with them — be it Fox, MSNBC or CNN — and it’s not uncommon for them to develop “parasocial interactions” with anchors and reporters as they do with actors, thinking of them as friends. They’re hyperaware when an anchor shifts to a new time slot or vanishes. In previous columns, I’ve noted that dedicated cable news watchers keep their favorite news channel burning all day, drawing warmth and comfort from it as if it were a hearth. This is why the “UnFox My Cable Box” campaign by activists to remove Fox from cable companies’ dials went nowhere. If their boxes were unFoxed, the first thing many of them would do is riot.

Cord-cutting, meanwhile, is real, but the threat has been overstated. According to Variety, total pay-TV penetration (cable and satellite) has fallen from about 90 percent of households in 2011 to about 59 percent currently. This would theoretically mean fewer viewers, reduced license fees and less advertising revenues, crimping the estimated $3.1 billion in profits and sending the industry into a tailspin. But the tailspin has not come.

It’s true that the news channel audience has declined from its peak, according to Pew Research, during the horrible years of 2019 through 2020. But all media suffered after the passing of the Trump bump. When you look at the long-term trends, the audience isn’t smaller than it was in 2016. Also, cable news profits exploded five-fold over that same time, says Pew. If this is dying, it’s dying with pockets full.

Though the king of the TV hill has lost a few feet of elevation, it doesn’t mean that much if everybody around him is slipping, too. As the Los Angeles Times’ Battaglio pointed out, the cable news business is doing better than other linear television outlets. “Households that remain in the pay-TV universe watch a lot of news and sports,” he wrote, adding that the combined average audience of the three cable news giants is 37 percent higher than in 2014-2015, when the cable channels reached many more households. “All three rank in the top five among cable networks and still deliver significant profits for their parent companies,” he added.

Cord-cutting has inflicted more damage on entertainment channels than news channels. As John Koblin recently wrote in the New York Times, many of cable’s once popular channels — TBS, Comedy Central, MTV and USA — have been reduced to “zombie channels” that air reruns, reality shows and live sports instead of the original programming cable news provides.

The cable news death watch recalls a similar one periodically directed against its near relative, the broadcast evening news programs. Nearly two decades ago, Fox auteur Roger Ailes was ready to bury the nightly news programs. Referring to Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, the three anchors on NBC, ABC and CBS at the time, Ailes said, “They’re dinosaurs, and when they’re gone, it’s extinction.’’

How wrong Ailes was. They’re all long gone, and the nightly news is still with us. The nightly news audiences may have continued to decline, but paradoxically they remain as important as ever. As Slate financial correspondent Daniel Gross wrote in 2005, the three nightly news programs averaged a combined 37.7 million viewers. By 2005, they were drawing only 25.9 million, a 30 percent decline. But all of broadcast TV had suffered an even worse decline. Thanks to the rise of cable and other options, the top-ranked show of today would have just barely snuck into Nielsen’s top 10 in 2005. A top-ranked show in 2005, like American Idol, wouldn’t have placed in 1972’s top 30. In this new environment, the shows Ailes said were doomed to becoming dinosaurs were drawing audiences that other shows couldn’t match.

Today, those three broadcasts attract an audience of about 20 million a night (not counting streamers), which is better than their 2016 numbers. That’s also more viewers than Sunday Night Football attracts, which is the No. 1 show according to Nielsen. Advertising revenue is down compared to recent years, but nobody who looks at the data should extrapolate that the evening news is doomed. An audience that loves to watch its news by appointment has endured in the era of fragmentation.

Might streaming spell the end of cable news? Or could it be its future? Streaming now accounts for 38.7 percent of all television viewership, with cable coming in second at 29.6 percent and broadcast third at 20 percent, according to Nielsen. As laid out in this 2022 POLITICO Magazine feature, most TV news providers — from CNN and Fox, to NBC, ABC and CBS — have followed the technology and moved into the streaming space.

Just because a viewer snips the cable doesn’t mean he’s going to spurn cable news. Over-the-top (OTT) providers like Hulu + Live TV, Sling, YouTube and others carry cable news, too, a technology that many cable cutters have adopted. Watching cable news via OTT instead of cable is a distinction without a difference.

A willingness to position their news wherever the audience might go is essential, Morse says, be it in shows or podcasts or interactives or mobile apps. CNN and Fox have already successfully moved their news brand onto the web, where they currently hold the No. 2 and No. 3 spots in the news website rankings, but plenty of room for innovation remains in that space. “It’s much more than just taking your linear product and putting it on a website,” Morse says.

While cable news’ audience may erode the way other audiences have, it would be wrong to count the medium out. Cable will remain a popular source of news and continue to shape our politics. For now, at least, the channels convey a sense of the “now” to viewers better than any other news medium, especially to its older, devoted audience. No news technology is immortal — just ask the last of the telegraph operators. But contrary to its detractors, cable news isn’t likely to tip into an existential abyss any time soon. Just ask your grandfather.

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Disclosure: Derek Thompson, whose work I admire, criticizes me so gently in the Atlantic piece I mention above that it felt like a backrub. I watch cable mostly during disasters and riots and Election Day. When do you watch? Send comments via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My X account said my RSS feed would live forever, but that turned out not to be so.