The graph to the left shows the number of viewers that Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and This Week have for the television seasons of 2003-2006. The information is obtained from the annual surveys put out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism which runs the website http://www.journalism.org/. The numbers to the left represent millions of viewers. The line at the top represents the total number of viewers for the three shows.
As you can see, there has been a decline from 2003 to 2006 for all three shows, and for the total number of viewers, but the decline has been the sharpest for Meet the Press. In 2003 Meet the Press had 4.7 million viewers and in 2006 Meet the Press had 3.8 million viewers. That represents a decline of 19%. While the other shows also had declines, neither was as sharp as Meet the Press. Indeed Meet the Press accounted for approximately 900,000 of the 1.25 million that the total number of viewers decreased by from 2003 to 2006.
What's interesting is that the steepest decline for Meet the Press took place from 2005 to 2006 when the number of viewers fell by 700,000. That same time period also saw viewers for Face the Nation fall by 400,000 while This Week viewers fell only by 100,000.
If you add Fox News Sunday to the total, the picture doesn't get that much better for the Sunday morning political talk shows. According to the annual surveys Fox News Sunday has gone from 1.5 million viewers in 2004 down to 1.3 million viewers in 2006. That means if you add in the viewers for Fox News, four shows drew 10.4 million viewers in 2006 compared to the 10.35 million three shows were drawing in 2003.
It would be interesting to compare the demographics of the Sunday morning political talk shows to see how many viewers who watch these shows are under 30 years of age. It can't be very good. According to the 2007 survey, which was based on 2006 viewers, the median age for viewers who watched the nightly news shows was 60 years old or above for NBC, CBS, and ABC. If that is any indication of the demographics for the Sunday morning talk shows, it could be a bleak future for the Sunday morning blowhards.
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