NEW YORK — Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf made a crucial visit to Washington last week and CNN and Fox News Channel carried his many appearances throughout the day live.
MSNBC? It was airing the women's biathlon competition from the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
That hardly sounds like the way for the third-place cable news network to build viewer loyalty, but MSNBC, as a key component in NBC's strategy to amortize its $545-million Olympics rights fee, had little choice.
When the January cable news ratings were released, the buzz was all about Fox News Channel, which passed CNN for the first time in average total viewers. At NBC, however, it was a wake-up call.
MSNBC, which launched at the same time as Fox in 1996, now ranks a distant third in the cable news wars. Even though January figures showed the average number of total viewers watching the channel was up 23% year to year, Fox and CNN were up more. In 2002 to date, MSNBC is garnering a mere 18% of prime-time news audience for those three networks in its key sales demographic of 25- to 54-year-olds.
While NBC executives have long maintained that they are happy with MSNBC's viewers--who tend to be younger and more affluent than those watching Fox and CNN--the January ratings provoked a round of internal debate about just what's gone wrong and how to fix it.
With its corporate parents, General Electric-owned NBC and Microsoft Corp., MSNBC was given better odds to succeed than Fox. It had the money, promotional clout and NBC News prestige. Instead, media industry observers have scratched their heads over the years as MSNBC has struggled and its programming strategy has flip-flopped.
NBC didn't even really mind being third, executives there say, because MSNBC is a success financially, allowing millions of dollars in NBC News costs to be amortized even when the joint venture isn't making money, as is the current case. But now that the advertising market is starting to pick up, MSNBC isn't in a strong position to cash in because it has let its news business slide.
"MSNBC isn't a must-buy network in the news arena," said Stacey Lynn Koerner, senior vice president and director of broadcast research at Initiative Media North America.
As it turned out, the advantage of having well-known parents has turned out to carry some disadvantages too. Instead of creating a channel that strives to be the best it can be, executives at MSNBC must consider decisions in light of their effect on other NBC properties.
