Baltimore Sun Television Critic David Zurawik reports that PBS NewsHour has lost 48 percent of its audience over the last eight years. NewsHour‘s average audience, the number of people watching at any given minute in a program, is 950,000.
“I firmly believe this nation needs at least one non-commercial, national news broadcast,” Zurawik writes. “It is important to democracy. But it is long past time to ask some hard questions about this one. I think it is reasonable to ask whether NewsHour is actually a national broadcast any more with these audience numbers.”