MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL IS BACK AT NO. 1

It was only a pre-season contest between the Carolina Panthers and the New York Jets, but it returned NBC’s Sunday Night Football to the top spot on the Nielsen ratings list for last week. NBC nabbed two other spots on the top ten, the Tuesday performance edition of America’s Got Talent, which came in at […]

SHOOTING COVERAGE TOPS FRIDAY’S RATINGS

CBS, NBC, and ABC on Friday dumped scheduled programming to present news specials dealing with the theater massacre in Colorado. Final ratings figures on Monday revealed that none of the specials individually drew a sizable audience, but together they accounted for more than 17 million viewers. CBS led off at 8:00 p.m. with a 748 […]

SENSATIONAL INTERVIEWS GO HEAD-TO-HEAD IN PRIMETIME

It was the week when ABC’s Diane Sawyer was expected finally to beat her arch rival, NBC’s Brian Williams, in the ratings. Not on the evening news, where she trails Williams by about a million viewers, but in primetime, when her 20/20 interview with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was expected to clobber Williams’s new magazine show, […]

TSUNAMI SWEEPS OVER TV

Japan’s NHK network has provided gripping coverage of the earthquake and tsunami that struck the country early on (Friday). Throughout the day, NHK tracked the devastating progress of the deluge, showing the massive tidal wave carrying boats onto farmlands, sweeping up homes and cars — and people — and carrying them away. The television network […]

TUESDAY IDOL SPECIAL IMPACTS RIVAL NETWORKS

A special Tuesday edition of American Idol boosted Fox to a first-place finish in the ratings as it averaged 21.26 million viewers from 8:00 -9:30 p.m. While CBS, the usual Tuesday-night winner, drew solid numbers, they were nevertheless down significantly as a result of the stiff competition from Fox’s Idol. NCIS attracted 19.19 million viewers, […]

ABC NEWS APOLOGIZES FOR ANOTHER ETHICAL MISSTEP

Admitting an ethical lapse for the second time in a one-month period, ABC News said Wednesday that Elizabeth Vargas should not have interviewed Michael Douglas about his divorce during a segment on Tuesday’s Good Morning America. The Post pointed out that Vargas dated Douglas while he was still married to his wife Diandra. During the […]

ABC ADMITS GROSS DISTORTIONS IN “20/20” FEATURE

A 20/20 feature that aired on ABC last Friday has blown up in the faces of the program’s producers like a certain Icelandic volcano. The feature, about a British man, Daniel Tammet, who has accomplished incredible memory feats, including learning the difficult Icelandic language in a week, was presented as if it had been filmed […]

ABC NEWS ELIMINATES A QUARTER OF ITS EMPLOYEES

ABC News’s latest round of staff cutbacks — the most stringent in its history — ended on Tuesday with the firing of 22 employees after more than 300-400 other staffers and contract employees agreed to take voluntary buyouts, the Los Angeles Times reported today (Thursday), citing a source familiar with the process. The number who […]