CNN slide marks triumph of opinion in cable news wars

These days, one wonders if CNN’s Anderson Cooper takes a look at the Nielsen ratings and, faced with the indignity of seeing his show beaten by Keith Olbermann reruns, sighs and says to himself, “Why in the world do I keep doing this? For God’s sake, I’m a Vanderbilt. I don’t need this … um, crap.”

For despite the considerable treasure and energy CNN has spent turning His Grayness into a pop culture demigod, ratings for his 10 p.m. ET show have tanked. He now regularly finishes in fourth place in the key age 25-54 demographic, behind both Olbermann on MSNBC and the drawling ruminations of Nancy Grace on CNN’s sister network, HLN. (The winner by a country mile in the time slot is Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren.)

And Cooper is far from alone when it comes to ratings woes at The Most Trusted Name in News. In November, the once-formidable Larry King not only trailed Fox’s Sean Hannity badly in total viewership, but he also had fewer viewers than MSNBC’s liberal commentator Rachel Maddow. Then last week, Joy Behar -- the outspoken new HLN host who lately has been riding a Nielsen rocket – edged ahead of King in the 25-54 demographic.

CNN’s prime-time ratings have been so woeful in 2009 that, with the year not yet over, the network has already conceded it will finish in fourth place in the 25-54 demographic, behind Fox, MSNBC and HLN (although CNN, which still outdraws MSNBC and HLN at other times of the day, will still finish No. 2 overall.)

Those numbers are clear evidence that the strategy originally conceived by CNN to catch Fox in prime time – building programs around personalities such as Cooper and Campbell Brown but steering clear of the type of opinionated, partisan fare that is Fox’s bread and butter – has flopped, particularly since MSNBC decided to reinvent itself as the anti-Fox.

(Indeed, two of the biggest stories in cable news this year were the ratings surge of MSNBC’s liberal-oriented prime-time lineup and the stunning success of Glenn Beck’s outrageously opinionated show on Fox, which in November beat every program on cable news except for fellow Fox host Bill O’Reilly, averaging more than 2.6 million viewers despite airing at the less-then-ideal time slot of 5 p.m. ET.)

The wizards at CNN who developed this game plan apparently thought they could catch Fox by embracing personality while decoupling it from opinion. So they centered news shows around high-profile, high-priced anchors, who would be edgy with without displaying an overt point of view, and they encouraged their talent to make themselves part of the story whenever possible.

These dynamic new empathetic anchors were supposed to turn CNN’s prime-time schedule into true destination television, an alternative to the partisan slugfests on Fox. But the network brass, it turns out, misunderstood how the cable audience actually behaves.

Millions of viewers will tune into Fox each night to see what O’Reilly or Hannity has to say, regardless of what’s happening in the news, and increasing numbers from the other end of the political spectrum are turning on MSNBC to watch Olbermann and Maddow.But what CNN discovered the hard way is that building that kind of audience loyalty to a specific show is much more difficult if the focus is news instead of commentary.

Viewers who want to see O’Reilly opine and joust have nowhere to go but his show. But viewers who want the day’s news don’t have to get it from Cooper or Brown. They have a myriad of options, and not even Cooper’s celebrity and velvet delivery have been able to generate enough audience loyalty to be competitive. And if he can’t pull it off, who can?

Of course, for all its prime-time problems, CNN still has significant strengths. Its news-gathering operation, both domestic and international, is much broader and deeper than its competitors, which becomes particularly evident in breaking news situations. CNN also remains the world’s premium news brand, which attracts advertisers and keeps the network competitive with Fox in profitability despite lagging far behind in ratings.

And while CNN’s share of the overall cable news audience pie is shrinking, the network touts the fact that the average number of viewers it has attracted in 2009 is actually higher than for any year in its history except 2008, when the dramatic presidential race triggered an audience spike for all of the cable nets.

Although MSNBC has now passed CNN in prime time, when the two go head-to-head with straight newscasts during the rest of the day, CNN blows MSNBC away, in ratings and quality. Overall, CNN remains a solid No. 2 (although the gap with Fox is now so wide that the powers-that-be in Atlanta barely even attempt to put up the pretense of any real competition.)

Now that its personality-driven model is a bust, where does CNN go from here?

One quick way to boost prime-time numbers would be to move some HLN shows with growing audiences, such as Grace and Behar, to CNN proper, where they might have enough impact to overtake MSNBC. The network has long pooh-poohed speculation that Grace -- the most likely candidate for such a switch -- might move from HLN to CNN. But recent ratings trends make the merits so obvious that it’s hard to believe a switch hasn’t been discussed.

Some recent smoke signals rising from CNN Center also offer the tantalizing prospect that the network may be going back to its roots – showcasing the news itself, instead of the people who read it, and emphasizing the strength and depth of its journalism. Among those hopeful developments: The departure of crank-without-portfolio Lou Dobbs, his replacement with veteran Washington reporter John King (a clear shift away from opinion) and the launch of two weekend shows focusing on foreign affairs.

The irony here is that CNN appears ready to once again embrace the very vision it abandoned to quixotically chase Fox. That’s would cheer long-frustrated fans of the old CNN, but the viability of this strategy seems questionable now that opinion and news are now thoroughly mingled on the cable nets and audiences have segmented along partisan lines.

CNN’s ratings this year show that trying to build a competitive audience using celebrity anchors with no visible agenda hasn’t worked. So it’s hard to see how the network will do any better by jettisoning both personality and opinion in favor of Journalism with a capital “J.”

Then again, with Fox occupying the ground to its right and MSNBC camped to its left, CNN may not have a better choice.