• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 3, 2015

With the state of TV news being questioned these days, perhaps taking a look at advertising revenues gives a clearer picture.

Worried about Brian Williams at NBC? How about the whereabouts  of  Fox’s Bill O’Reilly during the Falklands War? Don’t worry. Advertisers will still go where viewers head -- in spite of anything else.

For its part, Fox News Channel continues to dominate in ad revenues -- sitting at around $776.4 million in 2013, well above the $319.8 million that CNN pulled in.

For its part, NBC pulled in around $200 million in advertising revenue from “NBC Nightly News” a year ago; ABC’s “World News Tonight”, was at $170 million; and “CBS Evening News” at $150 million -- this according to Kantar.

Even amid some recent questionable news about particular news anchors -- we might call anchors what they do in the U.K., “news readers” -- ratings haven’t moved much.

Recently, “NBC Nightly News," now with Lester Holt, took some dips, but remained generally stable from 2008 to 2013, going from 8.56 million to 8.43 million viewers. For the most recent week the show had 10.1 million viewers.

And Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor” posted 3.3 million viewers in a recent edition, its highest level since last November -- with Fox News overall recently earning around 2.4 million prime-time viewers.

So all those questions about news anchors may mean for TV viewers -- at the minimum -- a shrug of shoulders. The maximum? Seemingly much gossip/celebrity titillation. For advertisers? Much of the same, continuing.