Blog – Don Irvine

CNN, which is coming off its worst ratings month in over 10 years, continued its downward spiral on Friday when it failed to attract more than 100,000 viewers during any time slot between 5 and 9 p.m. in the key A25-54 demo.

Erin Burnett’s OutFront, whose ratings are well below the expectations of CNN, was actually the best performing show in the demo last Friday, attracting 99,000 viewers, which was 12,000 more than Anderson Cooper could muster in the hour following Burnett.

That’s probably why it was reported yesterday that CNN was attempting to poach Jake Tapper from ABC.

Tapper, who is currently the Senior White House Correspondent at ABC and has been passed over twice as host of This Week, would be a huge pickup for CNN. But according to Mediaite, he is very happy with his current job at ABC.

But that could be little more than posturing and could easily change, depending on what CNN offers Tapper, which would most likely include a primetime slot.

ABC is unlikely to let Tapper go without a fight. But it will be difficult for them to offer him more airtime without displacing someone else, which won’t be an easy task.

CNN will have to wait until Tapper’s contract with ABC expires before making him a formal offer. But with their ratings tanking, time is not something the network has much of to spare.

During a segment last Friday on Hollywood’s support for Obama, with actor and director Rob Reiner, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews said that when Wall Street backs a Republican candidate they are doing it because it is in their financial interest. When Hollywood celebrities back a candidate, however, they are doing it because they share cultural values.

Matthews: It seems to me that the people at Wall Street—let’s put it to the Republican side, I’m going to stick it there. When they invest in a Republican candidate, they’re investing in their businesses. They want a better tax break, they want less regulation, I mean, dammit, in a certain weird, perverted way they should get a tax write-off because what they’re doing is for the money.

And you guys are doing it for cultural reasons because you share values with the president. Now maybe gay people, especially gay people, are concerned. And they do get a value out of this and interest in terms of rights, but that’s what they have a right to anyway, I would argue. But this is interesting. You guys out on the coast out there do it because you agree with the president. People in Wall Street and the business world and Texas around there, they give money because they make money off Republican politics.

Reiner: That’s exactly right and it’s interesting but the Hollywood community is the only donor base, as you call it, that has no quid pro quo. We don’t support a candidate because he might be able to do something for us. When you see the Koch brothers throwing what’ll be twenty to hundreds of millions of dollars into a PAC, they’re looking for a payback. They want—and they’ll get it, too, if that man gets in the White House, they will get with—

Matthews: Oil money, oil breaks—

Reiner: Money, regulations that are reduced to allow them to pollute and do all the things that they want to do. We’re the only group of donors that doesn’t ask for something in return. We support somebody because, like you said, they share our values, whether it comes to education, healthcare, the environment, the economy, social issues. They’re in line with how we feel about things and we look at the totality of a candidate, not just at a very narrow, specific financial interest.

Matthews makes it seem like Wall Street money only backs Republicans, but he knows that isn’t true. According to the Sunlight Foundation, in 2008 Obama received more money from Wall Street than any politician in the last 20 years, including former President George W. Bush. Obama took in $15.8 million from Wall Street.

Funny, I don’t recall Matthews complaining about Wall Street money supporting Obama four years ago.

Obama is going to face a tougher time this year with Wall Street, as Romney has closer ties to business, and is promising to turn the economy around, compared to Obama’s policies, which are viewed by much of the business community as anti-business.

Matthews knows that, so he has gone back to the old liberal tactic of demonizing Wall Street support for the GOP in an effort to downplay their lack of enthusiasm for Obama.

What a difference four years makes.

During his opening Media Monitor segment, CNN’s Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz criticized MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall for cutting off the microphone of conservative guest Tim Carney last week.

Hall and Carney were having a heated discussion of a Washington Post story about the bullying charges leveled against Mitt Romney from when he was in high school. Carney accused Hall of using an old media trick, to which Hall took umbrage and cut off Carney’s microphone.

Carney: But what you’re doing here is a typical media trick: You hype up a story, and then you justify the second-day coverage of the story by saying, “Oh, well, people are talking about it. Here’s how Romney responded to it—“

Hall: You don’t have to answer a single question I ask you. You do not. And you did not have to accept the invitation to come on. You knew what we were going to be discussing…You’re not going to come on and insult the network when you knew what you were going to come on and talk about. Done.

Kurtz said that it was Hall who was being insulting by silencing Carney when she cut off his microphone. Kurtz defended Carney’s right to say that the bullying story was being hyped, and he wondered if Hall only wants guests who agree with her opinion on every story.

Not only was Hall insulting, but she was totally unprofessional in the way she handled the interview. She acted more like a child since, as she admitted, Carney was irritating her. Her response was to cut off his microphone for expressing a viewpoint that differed from her own.

And what did Hall think when she booked Carney for the show? After all he is a noted conservative in Washington, D.C. and works for a conservative newspaper. Did she actually think that Carney was just going to roll over and play dead when presented with Hall’s overhyping of the Romney story?

Hall would do well to realize that it’s probably not a good thing to throw a temper tantrum on national television and she should apologize to Carney for her behavior. But that would mean that she would have to admit that the only bully on the show that day was herself.

NBC announced on Friday that it was pulling its primetime newsmagazine show Rock Center with Brian Williams for the rest of the month and left its future up in the air. The show will be replaced by reruns of Law and Order: SVU.

Rock Center has been struggling in the ratings since it debuted last year and continually trails ABC’s 20/20 program by more than two million viewers each week.

By replacing the show with Law and Order episodes, NBC is unlikely to do any better in the ratings during the important May sweeps, but it gives them an excuse for poor ratings and buys the network some time to consider retooling the show.

NBC is holding out the possibility that the show will return in the fall, but more as a fill-in show for programs that flop with viewers.

The network seems determined to do what it can to save the show in some capacity, despite the ratings, and achieve the goal of creating a franchise that will last 20 years, which is what David Corvo, Senior Executive Producer of Primetime News, said back in March that he wanted Rock Center to become.

At this rate, though, Rock Center will be lucky to get much past one year, much less 20.

UPDATE:  NBC has decided to put Rock Center in the fall lineup after all.  It will air on Thursday night’s at 10 p.m. facing off against procedural dramas from CBS and ABC which will make it even harder to achieve ratings success.

Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts told George Stephanopoulos that she got “chills again” when interviewing President Obama and hearing him say that he supported gay marriage.

Stephanopoulos: A little news from the President yesterday, and Robin what a watershed moment. Whatever people think about this issue, we know it’s controversial, there’s no denying when a president speaks out for the first time like that, it is history.

Roberts: And let me tell you, George, I’m getting chills again, because when you sit in that room and you hear him say those historic words. It was not lost on anyone in that room.

Stephanopoulos: And you didn’t know going in, you knew he was going to address this but you didn’t know exactly what he was going to say.

Roberts: You never know what he’s going to say until you ask him. And we did talk about other things as well.

Pardon me for feeling like I’m experiencing a little bit of déjà vu from  Roberts’ comments, as they sound eerily similar to when Chris Matthews said that he “felt this thrill running up my leg” after listening to Obama give a speech in 2008.

Thrills and chills. All we need are some spills and we would have an amusement park ride.

According to Politico, while the White House considered Roberts a skilled interviewer, she was also considered a safe choice due to her friendly relationship with the Obamas and the fact that she came from a morning television program she rarely expressed her political opinions.

Roberts couldn’t have done a better job for Obama if she had been paid by the White House for conducting the interview, as she served up softball questions on the issue of gay marriage and didn’t question the President’s response to any of her questions.

No wonder Roberts got chills. That wasn’t an interview, it was a love fest.

So goes another member of the media into the tank for Obama.

After just seven months, Erin Burnett, who was hired away from CNBC by CNN with much hoopla, has failed to meet expectations, much less the ratings of her predecessors.

Burnett’s show, Out Front, was launched in October, replacing the low-rated John King, USA. The show is a departure for Burnett who was known for her business reporting at CNBC, but she relished the opportunity to broaden her work.

The show, however, peaked in terms of ratings in November when it drew 510k Total Viewers and 140k viewers in the key A25-54 demo. Since then, the numbers have continued to slide to just 409k in Total Viewers and 113k in the demo in April. So far this month, the show is averaging 309k/78k respectively in total viewers and the demo.

That compares to John King, USA which averaged 523k/172k in April 2011.

This trend doesn’t bode well for CNN, which is coming off its worst ratings month in more than 10 years. If the early ratings for Burnett’s show in May are any indication, the network will hit another multi-year low when the ratings are released later this month.

Even though it has only been seven months since CNN launched Burnett’s program, her inability to build an audience has to be disturbing to CNN president Ken Jautz, who was hired in 2010 to try and duplicate the success he achieved at HLN.

After some promising ratings news in 2011, which was largely due to world events in Japan and the Middle East, the network seems to be settling back into third place behind Fox News and MSNBC, but losing even more ground at the same time.

If Burnett’s ratings continue to slide she may want to think about a backup plan, such as following former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs to Fox Business or returning to CNBC, before CNN brings the hammer down.

The bitter battle between The New York Times and the Newspaper Guild of New York, which represents writers and reporters at the paper, continued this week with the release of a video by three of the Times’ Pulitzer Prize winners asking the paper to accede to the union’s contract demands.

In the video, Dan Barry, Kevin Sack and Amy Harmon praised the Times for its content and expressed their concerns about the extended labor negotiations, with Sack assessing how much things have changed since he started working at the paper:

Sack: “I think one of the real changes out there in the media landscape out there, that we have to be aware of, is that there are alternatives now. The electronic media evolution has gotten to the point where there are competing organizations that will now pick off Times reporters and are able to pay them significantly higher salaries than the paper is putting forth at this point.”

It’s that changing landscape that the Times is struggling with. While they have had some success establishing a paywall, it hasn’t been enough to offset the continued decline in advertising revenue, which amounted to 8.1% in the latest quarter, contributing to a whopping 24.3% decline in operating profit.

Total revenue at the paper fell by 0.3 percent to $499.4 million, marking the fifth consecutive quarter that the Times has reported a revenue decline, which is not good news for its long-term financial health.

With this video the Guild is trying to increase the pressure on the Times. But with continued poor financial results, Barry, Sack and Harmon may find their futures lie elsewhere.

According to Adweek, The Washington Post held a secret meeting between management and some of its top journalists last month to discuss the journalists’ concerns about what they felt were the loss of newsroom resources, while management wanted to  talk about how they plan to address the challenges the newspaper is facing.

The meeting included journalists Dana Priest, David Finkel and Carol Leonnig, and Steven Hills, the president and  GM of the Post, and took place at the home of former Post reporter Bradley Graham on April 17. Notably absent was executive editor Marcus Brauchli.

Over sandwiches around the dining room table, the journalists expressed concern about the loss of newsroom resources. Accounts of the evening that are making the rounds suggest it was hardly comforting to their journalistic souls. Hills was said to have shocked with remarks that awards “don’t matter,” urged more traffic-driving slideshows over original Post photos, and compared the Post to Ohio’s Dayton Daily News, a paper with one-fifth the circulation of the 508,000-circ Post.

Even though the participants apparently agreed to not talk about the meeting, Hills told Adweek’s Lucia Moses in an email that the meeting was no big deal.

“I was having a wide-ranging informal conversation at a dinner party with my colleagues, who happen to be some of the best reporters and editors in the business, about the challenges that we face.”

Some of those challenges include the fact that the Post didn’t win a single Pulitzer for the first time since 2007, the embarrassing exit of a blogger after she was caught plagiarizing a post on the paper’s website and the continuing decline of the newspaper’s financial  situation.

The latest quarterly report shows that the newspaper division lost $22.6 million, almost double last years $12.8 million loss, thanks largely to a 17% drop in print advertising revenue and a 7.4% decline in weekday circulation to 492,600. Even the digital side, where Hills wants to drive more traffic, underperformed in the quarter with a 7% decline in ad revenue, casting doubt on the Post’s digital strategy.

If the journalists were concerned about the reduction in newsroom resources before the meeting, they should be scared stiff today as the latest losses will undoubtedly lead to further belt tightening in the near future as the Post tries to keep the newspaper division afloat.

Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller used his latest Times column to rip Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Fox News, pointing to Murdoch’s troubles in Great Britain over the hacking scandal. He called Fox “the good son. It is the most reliable profit center,” for Murdoch’s media empire. But, he argued, “at least for Americans — Fox News is Murdoch’s most toxic legacy.”

“My gripe against Fox is not that it is conservative. The channel’s pulpit-pounding pundits, with the exception of the avuncular Mike Huckabee, are too shrill for my taste, but they are not masquerading as impartial newsmen. Nor am I indignant that Fox News is the cultural home of the Republican Party and a nonstop Obama roast. Partisan journalism, while not my thing, has a long tradition. Though I do wonder if the folks at Fox appreciate that this genre is more European than American.

“My complaint is that Fox pretends very hard to be something it is not, and in the process contributes to the corrosive cynicism that has polarized our public discourse.”

Keller also took issue with Fox News’ slogan of being “fair and balanced,” saying that he doubted that anyone at the network actually believed it and that it was really for “suckers” who believe that Fox is countering conservatives’ claims of liberal media bias.

Of course, this is all being seen through Keller’s own liberal lens, where liberal media bias doesn’t exist. He prefers to call it a “secular urban vantage point.” I’m not kidding. He accuses Fox of violating the journalistic code of parking personal biases at the door, reporting the facts and admitting to mistakes when they are made.

“But we try to live by a code, a discipline, that tells us to set aside our personal biases, to test not only facts but the way they add up, to seek out the dissenters and let them make their best case, to show our work. We write unsparing articles about public figures of every stripe — even, sometimes, about ourselves. When we screw up — and we do — we are obliged to own up to our mistakes and correct them.”

This code apparently doesn’t apply at the Times, since Keller told The Daily Beast in February that the paper would be “kind of tedious to read” if it achieved “absolute objectivity.”

And when was the last time the Times fessed up to a major mistake in the paper?

For all of Keller’s complaints about Fox, they are nothing more than a smokescreen for what is really bothering him — the fact that Fox is the undisputed leader in cable news and is expected to net a billion dollars this fiscal year while The New York Times continues to lose advertisers, print readership and money.

What Keller needs to recognize is that Fox News is here to stay and that the Left no longer controls the narrative like it did for so many years. That is only part of the problem for the Times, which continues to struggle financially while adjusting to a new media paradigm of plummeting print media circulation and the need to monetize its online product.

The Washington Post Company managed to double its overall net income in the first quarter of 2012, thanks to some one-time charges, but the newspaper division continued to be a drag on the rest of the company as its losses nearly doubled from the same period a year ago.

The newspaper division reported a loss of $22.6 million in the first quarter, compared to the $12.8 million loss the company reported last year for the same period. Print advertising fell by 17 percent to $52.7 million, and online advertising, an area the newspaper division was counting on to help offset print ad losses, fell 7 percent to $24.2 million.

Besides the steep decline in advertising, the Post also saw weekday circulation fall 9.8 percent to less than half a million at 492,600. Three years ago the weekday circulation was over 580,000, and 10 years ago it topped 750,000, marking one of the steepest declines in the industry among large city daily newspapers.

Sunday circulation fell a more modest 5.2% to 714,600, but it has fallen by 15.66% in the six-month period ending March 31, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

The company continues to be plagued by its Kaplan education division, which had been propping up the entire company for years. It suffered a loss of $13.2 million compared to a $20 million profit just one year ago amid pricing pressures and increased government regulation, which has negatively affected the entire adult education industry.

This reversal of fortune at Kaplan leaves the Post’s newspaper division exposed to further layoffs and other belt tightening measures as it tries to stem the increasing losses that threaten the viability of the entire company.

Shareholders and investors deserve an answer from management at this week’s shareholder meeting as to how they plan to slow down or reverse the rapid decline in the newspaper business before it drives the entire company out of business.

But they probably shouldn’t expect much since the Post, like The New York Times, is controlled by insiders who are more interested in protecting their own positions than worrying about what outside shareholders think.