News Munchies
Want the Real Scoop on O'Reilly and Olbermann?
Originally Posted
Updated
At CornerBarPR.com®, we've come late to the party celebrating TVNewser, but, now that we've found it, the blog about the teevee news business is too good to pass up.
Giving readers "the news about the news," TVNewser is an uneven, information-packed "who's where" and "what really happened" gossip/opinion/commentary "must" for on-air network and cable "news readers," who follow the blog to find out what's going on in their own industry.
TVNewser, named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the most influential blogs about TV, "was inspired by the television coverage of the 2003 war in Iraq, and it launched formally on January 1, 2004."
Gossip. Do we need anything else?
Among other things, 20-year-old blogger Brian Stetler posts news industry gossip, shares internal employee emails, breaks news on the news biz, and has a readership that includes many of the big names in television news.
In addition to news and gossip, Stetler posts ratings scorecards for all shows, 5:00 p.m. through 11:00 p.m., on FNC, CNN, HLN, MSNBC, and CNBC. MSNBC, pretending to be a real news network, has to be awfully frightened by the actual numbers.
Most-watched. Really.
Data for Wednesday, 26 Jly, show that FOX News isn't just spouting puffery when it calls itself the "most-watched" cable news network. It leads the other four cable networks throughout the evening hours.
In their time slots, O'Reilly at 8:00 p.m. EDT and Hannity & Colmes outpull all the other cable news channels combined. In prime time, FOX averages 2.17 million viewers, CNN 881,000, Headline News, 371,000, MSNBC, 296,000, and CNBC 143,000.
For comparison, the 6:00 p.m. news on local station KMBC-TV in Kansas City gets an audience one-third the size of the entire MSNBC network's viewership. And Kansas City is only the 29th largest DMA.
For the morning shows, TVNewser says, during the week of 17 Jly, NBC's "Today" led ABC's "Good Morning America" and "The Early Show" on CBS by 970,000 viewers:
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NBC 5,180,000
ABC 4,210,000
CBS 2,130,000
Too young to drink
NBC anchor Brian Williams freely admits that he follows TVNewser. But, he says, "it's a little disconcerting knowing that the main pulse of your industry is being taken by someone who cannot legally take a drink."
Oh, and although Keith Olbermann pretends that Bill O'Reilly is fueding with him, on 26 Jly, Olbermann's "Countdown" on MSNBC totaled 308,000 viewers in its head-to-head Prime Time slot against "The O'Reilly Factor," which pulled 2,343,000. If there's a contest, it's only in Olbermann's mind.