FOR RELEASE MARCH 19, 2013

Network News: A Year of Change and Challenge at NBC

After an unusual uptick in the overall audience for evening news in 2011, the trend line returned to its normal in 2012. The combined viewership for the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts dropped 2%, to 22.1 million, resuming the downward trajectory of nearly three decades. It now appears that 2011 may have been an outlier, with the bigger audience attributable to an unusual number of major news events that year, including the Arab Spring, the Japanese earthquake and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Even a presidential election couldn’t keep some viewers from deserting network news in 2012.

BY Emily Guskin, Mark Jurkowitz and Amy Mitchell

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RECOMMENDED CITATION

Pew Research Center, March 2013, "Network News: A Year of Change and Challenge at NBC"

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Table of contents

Network News: A Year of Change and Challenge at NBC

After an unusual uptick in the overall audience for evening news in 2011, the trend line returned to its normal in 2012. The combined viewership for the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts dropped 2%, to 22.1 million, resuming the downward trajectory of nearly three decades. It now appears that 2011 may have been an outlier, with the bigger audience attributable to an unusual number of major news events that year, including the Arab Spring, the Japanese earthquake and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Even a presidential election couldn’t keep some viewers from deserting network news in 2012.