Posted on 08/19/2002 7:46:54 AM PDT by Temple Owl
Woes of 'Donahue' Cast Shadow Over MSNBC
By BILL CARTER
Phil Donahue's ballyhooed return to national television, six years after leaving his groundbreaking syndicated talk show, is proving anything but triumphant. Four weeks after his new show's heavily promoted debut on MSNBC, Mr. Donahue has lost 40 percent of his audience and fallen well behind CNN's Connie Chung, the other prominent host with a new talk show weeknights at 8.
Mr. Donahue's early showing has rung some alarm bells inside MSNBC's parent, NBC, because his show was the centerpiece of a new strategy for the cable news channel. MSNBC significantly lags behind both CNN and the Fox News Channel and has been identified as the most frustrating long-term problem for NBC. The top management of both NBC and its parent, General Electric, have told MSNBC executives that they expect the problem to be solved — and soon.
The strategy for the channel, hatched by the MSNBC president, Erik Sorenson, with Neal Shapiro, the president of NBC News, called for MSNBC to wean itself away from relying primarily on covering the news of the day with documentary-style programs in prime time. Instead, it would move toward the kind of opinionated talk-all-the-time format that has worked so well for the industry leader, the News Corporation's Fox News.
To make room for Mr. Donahue, MSNBC displaced its former signature prime-time show, "The News with Brian Williams," shuffling it off to its sister channel CNBC. Besides Mr. Donahue, MSNBC, in which Microsoft is a partner, has added a a show whose host is the former newspaper editor Jerry Nachman, at 7 p.m., and one with Ashleigh Banfield at 10. Another, featuring the radio talk hosts Curtis Sliwa and Ron Kuby, will help fill daytime hours.
But Mr. Donahue's month-old show was clearly at the heart of the new strategy, and it received, according to one MSNBC executive, the most promotion the channel has ever devoted to any program. That resulted in a fairly strong opening week, with Mr. Donahue reaching a daily average of about 660,000 viewers.
But during the next three weeks, the viewer numbers dropped steadily. An average of 579,000 viewers tuned in during the week ended July 28, falling to 439,000 the next week, and then to 393,000. Meanwhile, Ms. Chung's audience has stayed consistently over 700,000, and Bill O'Reilly, whose Fox News show is the most-watched on any cable news network, handily beat both Mr. Donahue and Ms. Chung's shows combined. Mr. O'Reilly's ratings fell over the four weeks from 2.1 million viewers, to 1.9 million, but five of those shows had substitute hosts.
At a broadcast network, a program with the kinds of trend lines "Donahue" has becomes a prime candidate for cancellation.
But Mr. Sorenson and Mr. Shapiro both declared themselves to be unworried by the early results. They emphasize that August is the worst possible time for MSNBC to build ratings numbers because so much of its core audience — young professionals — is away on vacation and not interested in watching television.
They also pointed out that MSNBC viewer totals are generally above where they were a year ago. But that is true for all the cable news networks, partly as a result of the continuing interest in news since the Sept. 11 attacks and partly because of increases in distribution for all three news channels. MSNBC now reaches 16 percent more homes than it did last year at this time.
Others at NBC said the "Donahue" numbers were already a cause for serious concern. "If this show doesn't work, it has huge implications for a lot of people," one longtime NBC executive said. "There is huge corporate pressure on this one."
The pressure comes from the very top. Earlier this year, at a meeting of NBC's top management, Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, specifically cited MSNBC as the area of NBC that most needed attention. "He gave the order," the senior NBC executive said, "and the order was, `Fix it.' "
Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Sorenson argued that Mr. Immelt was more concerned about MSNBC being overshadowed by its competitors. "Jeff would say he had been in Washington and heard people talking about Fox and CNN, but he didn't hear people talking about MSNBC," Mr. Shapiro said. "Jeff wants buzz, and that's a totally new mission for us."
Mr. Sorenson said: "What Jeff really wants is for us to be competitive, to be in the game. I think we're already starting to get into the game. The next question is how we can translate that into ratings."
Indeed, overall questions remain about MSNBC's ability to sustain viewership in times when news is slow. As the longtime NBC executive put it: "We've never been able to convince the audience: What are we trying to be?"
Until Sept. 11, MSNBC officials believed they had devised a workable formula of news during the day and documentaries in prime time. The strategy was efficient and played reasonably well with the younger viewers the channel said it had set out to reach.
Sept. 11 changed that. Documentary programs were suddenly deemed irrelevant, and managers concluded that MSNBC needed to be on the story all the time. That evolved into a conviction that all-news channels had to have topical talk shows at night led by appealing hosts.
But that has left MSNBC without a way to distinguish itself from the news channels it has traditionally trailed, Fox News and CNN, which is part of AOL Time Warner. To make matters worse, on several days over the last month, the channel has actually finished fourth in the all-news cable competition, behind even CNN Headline News, the channel of daylong quick-hit newscasts.
Still, NBC executives, blaming the slow August news cycle, counsel patience, both with Mr. Donahue and the channel's new talk-centered format. Mr. Shapiro called Mr. Nachman "an acquired taste," and said his "different style" would eventually pay off with viewers.
As for Mr. Donahue, Mr. Sorenson said: "We're in the silly season. The news is so slow; it's been the summer of kidnappings. That plays more toward Connie. Her show is cotton candy. It's all tabloid, all the time."
CNN executives dismiss that criticism as both unfair and reflecting desperation on the part of MSNBC.
Mr. Sorenson said that come fall Mr. Donahue will start to take advantage of more news developments. "We'll have an election to cover and a war in Iraq," Mr. Sorenson said. The channel is counting on Mr. Donahue to handle that kind of subject matter better than Ms. Chung. "Connie has never played in this format," Mr. Shapiro said.
Beyond that, look for Mr. Donahue to book more celebrities. "He's going to have Oprah on and Harrison Ford and George Clooney," Mr. Sorenson said. "I don't honestly expect to have an answer on this until November."
But Mr. Shapiro acknowledged that the fall may be the make-or-break time for MSNBC. "We have to keep these shows moving forward," he said, adding that future investment and promotion budgets for the channel may be riding on it.
Even the mighty O'Reilly's numbers, impressive as they are, translate to about 10 million viewers per week. Not bad, eh?
Just to put things in perspective, the Master, Rush Limbaugh, on radio, gets an average of 20 million listeners per week. It'll be a long, long time before A) anyone comes close to such an achievement, and B) Limbaugh gets the proper recognition for literally saving AM radio and, in effect, "creating" talk radio as we know it today.
And, they hate Imus because he's not a televison person!
HaHaHaHa.
What a bunch of bright sparks!
I imagine everyone else has been thinking or saying the same thing about Donahue's old shop-worn, circa 1976 schtick. He just so patheticly washed-up it's embarrassing. Maybe the idiots at MSNBC oughta think about replacing Phil with some old Mickey Rooney pilots or Dinah Shore reruns -- the ratings can't get any worse.
1. Mr. Sorenson, gobbledegook doesn't help.
2. Viewer are tuning in to Fox for content, not personalities.
3. PMSNBC has to wrong content.
I see where you're going wrong. By thinking like a conservative, you assume they would work toward a solution, but you gotta remember liberals' stock in trade is wailing and gnashing of teeth, not solving problems. More likely, they are courting the likes of Walter Cronkite, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore (for the youth market).
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