WEATHER CHANNEL, STARRING ISAAC, IS TOPS

Television viewers, for the most part, didn’t like seeing their news channels on Tuesday attempt to split their coverage between the Republican National Convention and Tropical Storm Isaac. They tuned instead to The Weather Channel, which had the highest total-day ratings of any news channel among viewers 25-54 and the second-highest (behind Fox News) among […]

NFL PREGAME SHOWS TO BATTLE PRESIDENT OBAMA

Sunday Night Football kicks off the season on NBC tonight on an odd note. First of all, it”s not airing on Sunday night; it’s airing on Thursday night. Also, the pregame show will not be airing on NBC, but it will be airing on five cable networks instead, USA Network, Syfy, Versus, G4 and NFL […]

IRENE BLOWS IN WEATHER CHANNEL’S BIGGEST AUDIENCE

Katrina was more deadly and produced more destruction, but Irene got bigger ratings — at least so far as the NBC-owned The Weather Channel is concerned. According to Nielsen Research the channel averaged four million viewers on Saturday — the highest ratings for a whole day in its history, edging out the channel’s previous record […]

DID TV OVERHYPE IRENE?

Notwithstanding the destruction and death wrought by Hurricane — now Tropical Storm — Irene over the weekend, the damage actually fell far short of TV doomsayers’ forecasts. (Britain’s Guardian newspaper described it as “the storm that wasn’t.) But preliminary figures suggest that it likely produced record ratings for The Weather Channel, a unit of Comcast-controlled […]

NETWORKS BLOWING IN THE WIND

President Obama today (Friday) urged Americans to take the threat of Hurricane Irene “seriously.” Certainly the broadcast networks and the cable news networks are, as well as local stations on the East Coast in cities that are likely to feel the brunt of the storm. (In fact, in New York City Thursday night, all three […]