On- and off-line: one or two media?

.
Off-line, on the TV set, TV channel Fox News has the audience. Far ahead of CNN.
On-line, it is another story: the website CNN.com leads and FoxNews.com is left very far behind.
12 million unique users a month for FoxNews.com, two to three times less than CNN.com, according to Nielsen. According to comScore, the gap is even wider: 43.4 million for CNN.com, 11.4 for FoxNews.com.

Conclusions:

1. The differences in measurements by online panels are difficults to swallow... We already commented on that!
2. The hierarchy of brands online does not reflect the off-line hierarchy. In any case, if the rankings were the same on and off line, it wouldn't prove that the measurement was correct.
3. Why is there such a difference in "people's choice" between on- and off-line news? We obviously don't know how people "elect" their news media - moreover, we don't know how to go about finding this out. But we can suggest a modest explanation: the two different media attract different people with different news cultures. Someone might prefer CNN.com on the computer and Fox News on the TV set. There is no contradiction. Why should there be? This could be extended to all media brands and all their vehicles. The consquences are many when it comes to mediaplanning (cross media) and editorial content as well. Not only do we need more research, we need different research.
4. What about audiences on the smartphones or tablets? Are they of another kind: neither traditional media nor Internet?