Watergate and Television

Abstract

This paper employs data from a "natural experiment," the televised coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings, to examine several hypotheses which have been advanced concerning television viewer behavior. This paper postulates a more general theory of audience preferences and develops a model to represent separate groups of viewer's with distinct preference orderings for program types. The results indicate that the previously proposed hypotheses-the "passive viewer" and "first choice only" hypotheses-concerning viewer behavior are deficient. These results also suggest that television viewing can be increased by the addition of new alternatives if they are sufficiently dissimilar to programs presently being shown. The programming decisions of the three networks can be represented as strategies in economic games involving audience-maximizing, loss-minimizing, and cost-minimizing payoffs. Collective action by the networks to provide rotated coverage, a departure from the usual practice of providing simultaneous coverage of major news events, is an especially attractive solution to the cooperative form of these games.