What are the signs that CNN has hit on a good business thing in its often overkill coverage of the mystery of Flight 370? Here are three.
SIGN ONE: Bill O’Reilly (in the ultimate irony for a Fox News personality) talks about another network “corrupting the news biz.”
SIGN TWO: CNN keeps doing more of it throwing out all possible speculative scenarios even supernatural and ignoring Jon Stewart’s ridicule.
SIGN THREE: the numbers are zooming:
The story of the vanished Boeing 777 jet has been exhaustively covered across every form of news media, with television generally leading the way. Each of the broadcast networks began its evening newscast with stories on the plane every night last week, a consensus that happens “once a year at most,” according to Andrew Tyndall, who publishes a weekly report monitoring newscasts.
But it is CNN, the cable network that has been scrambling to find a sustainable business model against its main competitors, Fox News and MSNBC, that has perhaps invested most heavily in the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
“It is a tremendous story that is completely in our wheelhouse,” said a senior CNN executive, who asked not to be identified defining the network’s strategy for its coverage. CNN’s ratings soared last week and over the weekend, rising by almost 100 percent in prime time. The network even managed the rare feat of edging past Fox News for leadership in several hours.
Last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the CNN 8 p.m. program, hosted by Anderson Cooper, beat Fox’s perennial ratings giant, Bill O’Reilly, in the audience that attracts the most revenue for news channels, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54. It was the first time Mr. Cooper has ever topped Mr. O’Reilly in the group for three straight days. (Mr. O’Reilly still won the week in that category.)
So really in the case of O’Reilly we do see a certifiable case of sour grapes. The case can’t be made that Bill O’Reilly has uplifted the news business and serious let’s-look-at-both-sides journalism on The O’Reilly Factor.
CNN also won the 25-to-54 age group from 2 p.m. through 10 p.m. on Saturday, and initial numbers from Sunday indicate the network again led across many of the hours of the day. This is only the case among the specific demographic group preferred by news advertisers; Fox News, as it always does, dominated in terms of total viewers.
“It’s an incredible mystery full of human drama, with an international element,” the senior CNN executive said. “Anything international plays into our hands because we have more reporters to deploy all over the world.”
But the executive acknowledged this was not really a story where reporters have been able to advance the known facts much. Instead, it has been fueled by a lot of expert analysis based on the little verifiable information that has been available, speculation about what might have happened to the plane and where it might be now, accompanied by all the visual pizazz the network can bring to bear.
That has been highlighted by extensive reliance on the reporter Martin Savidge sitting in a flight simulator in Ontario, Canada, as well as the reporter Tom Foreman walking across an animated map of the region displayed on the floor of what CNN calls its “visual room.” At one point the anchor Don Lemon used a toy model of the plane to illustrate a point being made by one of CNN’s aviation experts. During another interview, Mr. Lemon raised the question of whether something otherworldly happened to the plane.
News networks try to develop habits. They want viewers to turn to it to get the latest. It’s highly unlikely The bottom line is that all three networks are now in a frantic scramble to try an get viewers: Fox News wants to hold onto its dominance while CNN and MSNBC work to avoid being in third place.
The “winner” will be the network viewers turn to in breaking news stories on a regular basis.
Will CNN enjoy similar ratings if a crisis further blows up involving Russia?
Or is this a one shot deal? Is this were CNN begins to re-carve a brand or is it where it starts to morph into a version of HLN covering a court case, only this time talking (endlessly) about a missing plane?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.