Viewers showing battle fatigue

Television viewers never have been offered anything like the historic, real-time war coverage of the last three weeks: live firefights, Humvees rumbling across the Euphrates, palaces raided, statues toppled.

But as the war stretches on, many seem to be responding to the vast array of unprecedented coverage with indifference, or perhaps exhaustion. Like the fast-changing appetite for so-called “reality” television shows, what was riveting just two weeks ago is becoming passe to a growing number of viewers, with one live firefight blending into dozens of others.

Although cable news ratings are still vastly elevated -- totaling more than 10 million viewers at any given moment in prime time, roughly three times above what they were at this point a year ago -- the prime-time audience for Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC combined still lags behind CBS or NBC, and has diminished by more than 20% since the first week of the conflict in mid-March.

Ratings for the major network newscasts, meanwhile, are trending downward instead of getting their usual bounce for a major news story. Two of the three evening news programs have lost viewers from what they drew before the war began.

Unlike the Sept. 11 attacks -- a stunning, unanticipated event that spurred wall-to-wall coverage for days -- broadcasters knew the war was coming and conceded news viewers to cable early on by reverting to regular programming March 20, the day after action began. Since then, they’ve largely stayed with entertainment lineups while slightly increasing their prime-time news presence.

When the 1991 Persian Gulf War began, there was just one cable news network, CNN, and ABC stayed on the air for 46 hours -- then a record for a network’s uninterrupted noncommercial special report. This time, said Jeff Gralnick, executive producer for that ABC coverage and now a news consultant, “network news is not in the game. They’re not on.”

And viewers are indicating that they don’t need them to be. A poll released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that nearly 40% of those surveyed said news organizations have provided too much war coverage and that 45% said the media have given too little coverage to the tax-cut debate. Other issues, such as the economy and the budget deficit, have also been inadequately covered, a significant number of respondents said.

Ratings for CBS’ NCAA basketball tournament were off 20% this year compared with last year, which CBS Television President Leslie Moonves blames on the war. But top attractions have been unshaken, with more than twice as many people still tuning in to CBS’ “CSI” or Fox’s prime-time talent show “American Idol” as to all of cable news.

Network executives acknowledge some disappointment with their news ratings but at least publicly aren’t doing much second-guessing.

“Certainly, we would have thought the numbers would have been higher,” said Paul Slavin, executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” which has seen a 6% drop in total viewers when its three-week war average is compared with the season to date. The “CBS Evening News” -- disrupted in part by basketball telecasts -- is off 15%. NBC, which has an all-news presence thanks to MSNBC, has gained 3% for its “Nightly News.”

CBS’ Moonves rejects any suggestion that the networks have lost their claim as a primary source for news, other than perhaps among “news junkies” who watch for hours on end. “When you go wall to wall, there isn’t a whole lot going on. It’s ‘Whose retired general do you want to watch?’ ” he said. “It’s just a different sort of war than everybody expected.... I still think in time of crisis people are going to turn to the networks first.”

Network executives note that their audience of millions for evening newscasts alone still dwarfs the cable operations. “It’s like comparing very large apple to small oranges,” an ABC News spokesman said.

Nor are they conceding any part of this high-profile story. After a dicey two-day trip, Dan Rather arrived in Baghdad on Friday, where he will anchor the “CBS Evening News.” ABC is sending correspondent Dan Harris and others back to Baghdad. NBC News is opening a Baghdad bureau.

But some say that cable has fundamentally changed the landscape for major news events. Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly told his radio listeners this week that the war symbolizes a “changing of the guard” in television news. “No longer will [Peter] Jennings, [Dan] Rather and [Tom] Brokaw have the power that they once had,” he said.

Still, some network officials believe that as the war picture becomes clearer, the cable audience will ebb. Although all three cable news networks are drawing greater audiences than they were before the war started, ratings for MSNBC and CNN had fallen since the war began. This week, however, news interest surged on reports that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein might have been killed in a missile attack.

For NBC News President Neal Shapiro, the picture looks a little different. “I look at [the viewing patterns] and I think I’m lucky. NBC News is NBC and MSNBC, which has had quite a terrific performance during the war.

“Viewers watched ‘Nightly News’ when it was on and then when it wasn’t, the NBC audience went to MSNBC. For us, it proved we do indeed have the best model.”

Ratings leader Fox -- after seeing a drop of more than 20% from the first week of the war to the second -- has fared the best overall, holding steady since then thanks to high ratings for O’Reilly’s show and the channel’s other talk programs, which offer commentary and analysis.

Comic strip “Doonesbury” has captured the disconnect in incorporating a 24-hour war into the nation’s TV viewing patterns: In Tuesday’s strip, a bar full of people is finally persuaded to turn away from the Lakers game after a character says: “This is the first war where we can be with them! We can see the war as they see it!” But when the TV is switched to war coverage, all it shows is blowing sand.

Theories abound in TV newsrooms: Viewers find it too depressing. The war has gone on too long. The footage is repetitive. Viewers are tuning to one of the many new sources of video that weren’t available or as editorially strong in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, such as BBC America cable or one of the Spanish-language channels. The Internet is to blame.

Like others in a multitasking world, the war in Iraq is only a keystroke away for Jackie Kashian, a Los Angeles comedian. “Right now, I’m doing my taxes online. And every 15 minutes I’ll check what’s happening,” she said last week. Her news outlet of choice is the BBC Web site.

“Watching the war is like watching the world’s slowest car chase,” Kashian joked on stage early in the war, when video of allied troop movement quickly turned ubiquitous.

Terence Smith, a senior producer and media correspondent for PBS’ “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” said, “This is the first real-time war, and it’s wearing everyone out.”

Smith contended that the major networks have ceded some turf to cable while retreating to what they do best. “They have gone back to their strength, which is to pull it together and present it to you in a digestible package,” he said. “There is an audience for that, and an audience for serious analysis.”

Indeed, ABC’s “Nightline” -- which offers a daily recap called “The Big Picture” -- was up more than 20% last week versus the comparable period in 2002. “The NewsHour” and evening BBC newscasts, both of which air on public television, also report ratings gains in that range, although their overall viewership is much lower to start.

Still, the Times Poll last week found that nearly 70% of Americans say they are getting most of their war information from cable news channels.

That means viewers can dip in and out at will, watch NBC’s “Friends” and not feel as though they have missed out on the war’s latest developments, which are wrapped up several times an hour.

Cable news operations are seeing surges in their Web site traffic as well. According to data from Web measurement firm Comscore, visits to MSNBC.com (the most visited news-oriented Web site) rose 61% for March 19 through Wednesday, compared with the average for the four weeks before the war. CNN.com is up 39%, foxnews.com grew 102%.

The broadcast networks continue to cover the war extensively in their morning programs and provided extended coverage Wednesday when Iraqis and Marines dramatically felled a statue of Hussein. Even the morning shows, however, are gradually moving back to other fare, with few if any complaints.

Prime-time newsmagazines have done the same, featuring Lisa Marie Presley on ABC’s “Primetime Thursday,” the SARS epidemic on CBS’ “48 Hours,” the Central Park jogger on NBC.

If viewership has flagged, it’s because “we were given the script of this war in advance, both by the Pentagon and by newspapers and TV stations, that it was going to be a quick war,” said Bruce Cumings, a history professor at the University of Chicago and author of the book “War and Television,” which came out after the Persian Gulf conflict in 1991. “That was not only unduly optimistic, but it created a reaction when the war bogged down in the second week.”

For the broadcast networks, the question now becomes whether a fundamental shift has occurred. Alan Wurtzel, NBC president of research and media development, anticipates that prime-time viewing will gradually revert to prewar patterns but said it’s difficult to tell yet “whether certain viewing behaviors are going to be changed by the exposure to cable.”

Networks have already been grappling with how to compete in a cable world: ABC News and CNN held serious talks last year about merging, and CBS News has tried to expand its presence on other Viacom-owned cable channels such as BET and MTV.

“What the audience wants is an assurance that they will have what they want when they want it, and they can no longer depend, with the certainty they used to, on the over-the-air networks, so they go to cable news,” said Gralnick, the news consultant.

“The real question will be, will these viewing patterns stick post-the-war, the way they didn’t post-9/11?”

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Times staff writer Paul Brownfield in Los Angeles contributed to this report.