Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AK2004 who wrote (13499)	4/15/2003 3:48:03 AM
From: paret	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21614

Viewers Flee ABC News and CBS News NewsMax ^ \| April 14, 2003 \| Carl Limbacher Did CBS really think it would benefit from letting Dan Rather be a useful idiot for Saddam Hussein? Does ABC really think Americans want to watch its foreign, blatantly anti-American anchorman Peter Jennings? Too bad for them that the people are voting with their feet, their wallets and their remote controls. In an astonishing break from the past, viewership of these networks' evening news shows has actually declined during this wartime. Only NBC, which has a cable operation and has long been the least offensive of the former "Big Three" networks, registered a (small) increase in the newly released Nielsen ratings. "The overall decline in the evening news programs' ratings, coming at the same time as the three cable news networks achieved gains of more than 300 percent, could be a watershed moment in how Americans get their news on television," the New York Times noted today. "Going back the 15 years that I have researched it, the networks always show an increase of about 10 percent in viewing during heavy news periods," said Andrew Tyndall, founder of Tyndall Report, which monitors network newscasts. "This would be an unprecedented event." Too bad that the broadcast networks won't listen to Bernard Goldberg. Speaking to a NewsMax forum last week, he revealed why the networks are losing their audience and what they could do to stop the hemorrhaging. But ABC continues to prove Goldberg's assertion that the nets are in denial. Its execs "dismissed the shrinking numbers as insignificant, if not completely irrelevant," the Times reported. CBS, however, is finally starting to panic. After all, since the groveling Rather let himself be exploited as a mouthpiece by genocidal madman Saddam, viewership of "CBS Evening News" has plunged more than 15 percent. Even more embarrassingly, Fox News Channel's excellent morning program, "Fox & Friends," has beat CBS's "The Early Show" despite being available in 20 million fewer homes! The red-faced suits at the long-ago Tiffany Network are blaming ... the Bush administration. They whine that the policy of placing reporters with the military units in Iraq has boosted the cable channels. "This was a reporters' war, not an anchor war; this involved a series of very profound individual vignettes," complained Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, who still fails to understand how much middle America despises Rather. Fox Topples ABC By the way, it's not just the networks' news divisions that are hurting. One of the most underreported developments from last week was the Boston Globe's article on how the Fox broadcast channel has overtaken woeful ABC in the entertainment ratings. No doubt the overpaid and soon-to-be-jobless big cheeses at ABC have a lame excuse for that too.