Posted on 02/27/2003 10:24:19 AM PST by Mr. Mulliner
The numbers on MSNBC's Donahue versus Hardball. The February 26 CyberAlert noted how despite Donahue's abysmal ratings, the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes reported that Donahue was "MSNBC's most watched prime time program."I guess that's like arguing over which deck of the Titanic will fill with water first.
In a February 26 New York Times story, Bill Carter reported:
"In the 8pm slot, Mr. Donahue's show averaged 439,000 viewers over the past month, far short of his competitors, Connie Chung on CNN, who had 970,000 viewers, and Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, who dominated the hour with 2.7 million viewers.And it would appear that Donahue is gone from the line-up even sooner than expected. After running a repeat on Tuesday (with Peter Jennings), on Wednesday night MSNBC expanded Countdown: Iraq to two hours, from 7 to 9pm EST, an expansion that was not expected to begin until next week. Or it could have been a one- night aberration because of President Bush's Iraq speech ending at 7:50pm EST."Mr. Donahue's show had been growing slightly over the past few months, and he was actually attracting more viewers than any other show on MSNBC, even the channel's signature prime-time program Hardball with Chris Matthews. Mr. Matthews's show has averaged 413,000 viewers over the last month.
"The difference, an NBC News executive explained, was that Mr. Donahue's show was extremely expensive to produce, because it involved a studio audience. The network was also disappointed that he was not more competitive with Ms. Chung."
By the way, isn't Jesse Ventura going to have a show on MSNBC? When does that start?
It is no more difficult to tune in MSNBC than it is any other cable channel, so the fact that they cannot seem to find even a single winner tells us that there is something fundamentally wrong with the people who are picking the shows. Some people have the knack for knowing, when they see someone, that this person will be a hit. Roger Ailes has it. The guy has picked one ratings winner after another. It's beyond being a fluke... the guy has the "golden gut" for spotting talent. Before MSNBC spends another dime on a new show, they need to get somebody in there who has a better 'gut' than whoever they have now. It's just one loser after another at that place. Let's stop blaming the hosts and admit that whoever is picking them is out of touch with the public taste. It matters less whether they go liberal or conservative -- Alan Keyes and Phil Donahue were equally unsuccessful. |
Fox & Friends in the morning is dynamite. Brian Kilmeade has been on a roll for at least a couple weeks. He was over in Kuwait and got a squad of Marines to chant Mancow, during his segment. Mancow was stunned into silence and even cried. Great tv.
This week Kilmeade took on Janeane Garofalo and showed her to be the uninformed, anti-American twit she is.
I think they are on the level and it's a margin thing.
Like if you can sell 10 Phils for a profit of .10 cents a unit you made a dollar in profit.
Or, you can sell 5 Matthews @ .25 profit each and make $1.25 so even Phils are in higher demand, you make more selling Matthews.
When it comes down to money, I trust these guy's. Unless theres taxpayers subsidizing it, I don't think they will throw good money after bad.
(Please note: the dollar amounts assigned to each Liberal idiot are excessive.. They are grossly inflated only to serve as an example, the author of this post is in NO way suggesting either of them is actually worth this amount.)
Besides, Matthews has that Sunday show on NBC as an escape.
Maybe that's where the Dem's protection comes in?
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