Where people get their news is often a good measure of which media they favor. Figure 10.7, which appeared in "How Americans Get Their News" by Darren K. Carlson (Gallup Organization, December 31, 2002), reveals the ways in which people received their daily news from August 1995 and December 2002. In general, cable news networks, talk radio, and Internet news sources increased in popularity over these years, while the nightly network news programs and the local paper fell out of favor. Evening news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC took the biggest hit, with viewership dropping 19 percentage points from 1995 to 2002. Newspaper popularity increased slightly between March 1998 and July 1999 to a peak of 54% before declining again to 47%. The biggest increase occurred among Americans who got their news from cable, which rose from 23% to 41%. The number of people who said they received their news from the Internet increased from 3% to 15%.
A Gallup poll conducted in December 2004 revealed that some of these trends continued for two more years. In
FIGURE 10.7
particular, the number of people getting their daily news from the Internet increased to 20%. Daily local newspaper readership declined to 44% and daily viewership of the nightly network news dropped precipitously to 26%. Cable network news did not continue its rise, with daily viewership dropping slightly from 41% to 39%. A likely explanation could be that more people are turning away from television in general and to the Internet to get their daily news. In the 2002 report, Carlson pointed out that the Internet was not necessarily driving the established news organizations out of business. Many newspapers put their content online. Networks such as NBC have invested a lot of money and talent into developing Web sites, which received much of the Internet traffic from those looking for news.
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