Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Olbermann’s sloppy seconds beats AC360?

The most fascinating fact to come out of Monday’s announcement that CNN is the fourth place cable news network is that the 10 PM repeat of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown attracts more viewers than Anderson Cooper’s live news broadcast:

CNN, which invented the cable news network more than two decades ago, will hit a new competitive low with its prime-time programs in October, finishing fourth – and last – among the cable news networks with the audience that all the networks rely on for their advertising.

The official monthly numbers will be finalized at 4 p.m. Monday and will include results from Friday. CNN executives conceded that will not change the competitive standing for the month. CNN will still be last in prime time.

That means CNN’s programs were behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but even its own sister network HLN (formerly Headline News.) Three of its four shows between 7 and 11 p.m. finished fourth and last among the cable news networks. That was the first time CNN had finished that poorly with its prime-time shows.

The results demonstrate once more the apparent preference of viewers for opinion-oriented shows from the news networks in prime time.

CNN has steered opinion hosts like Nancy Grace to HLN, while maintaining more news-oriented shows on CNN itself. When news events are not being intensely followed, CNN executives acknowledge, viewers seem to be looking for partisan views more than objective coverage.

Individually, the CNN shows were beaten resoundingly by all the Fox News programs, but also lost to all of the MSNBC programs, including a repeat of Keith Olbermann’s 8 p.m. edition of “Countdown,” which beat the 10 p.m. hour of CNN’s signature prime-time program, “Anderson Cooper 360.” Again that was a first.

Also, can we puh-lease stop with the fallacy, thoroughly debunked here and elsewhere that only FNC and MSNBC represent “opinion journalism” while CNN is “news”?  Anderson Cooper is as liberal as Keith Olbermann and no one alive believed otherwise.

Topics: cnn, msnbc, fox, anderson-cooper, kieth-olbermann