It's very embarrassing that this is the kind of news reporting that accumulates wide viewership in America. Rather than learning anything, we'd prefer to just be wowed with an explosion.
I'm really hoping that Al Jazeera's US campaign is at least a moderate success, but I'm not holding my breath. It'll give some much needed variation in reporting, or so I hope. Likely it will be viewed about as widely as BBC America, or less.
Make what you will also, but BBC Turkish has been one of the very few neutral and dependable news sources in the entire Turkish Gezi events. They did their job so well they earned insults from Prime Minister Erdogan and Mayor of Ankara, both calling the reporter on ground, Selin Girit, "a whore committing treason". Which gave BBC Turkish a spotlight they ran with—they deserve it.
google for CNN ratings and the first link I found is a press release from exactly one week ago "proudly" reporting that CNN's "New Day" program from 6 to 9 am (presumably EDT?) had a whopping 302,000 viewers.
google "united states population" claims 313.9 million, but thats not counting illegals so we'll call it a cool third of a billion.
WAY over 99% of the population is doing something other than watching CNN.
You're getting pretty far down in the weeds, getting comparable to if you asked a random person on the street, the odds of them having the same birthday as you, or they watched CNN this morning, are vaguely similar to more than a sig fig.
By comparison, the mighty GOOG combined with some basic arithmetic gives the result that "about" 125 times more people watched the superbowl than watched CNN this morning. Still only about 1/3 of the population, but getting closer to broadcasting and "wide viewership".
Its a great example of extreme narrowcasting, not broadcasting and certainly not "wide viewership". Nobody watches that stuff, they just don't culturally matter anymore. Only rare and unusual oddballs (nothing personal intended) watch TV news networks.
I'm really hoping that Al Jazeera's US campaign is at least a moderate success, but I'm not holding my breath. It'll give some much needed variation in reporting, or so I hope. Likely it will be viewed about as widely as BBC America, or less.
http://america.aljazeera.com/