NBC: FIRST WITH FOOTBALL, LAST WITH EVERYTHING ELSE

Once again NBC’s Sunday Night Football ranked No. 1 for the week with 20.3 million viewers tuning in — but football was all she wrote for the struggling network, whose second-highest-rated show, Law and Order: SVU, came in at No. 40. CBS’s NCIS captured nearly as many viewers as the NFL — 20 million, at […]

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, […]

SAWYER LANDS HUSBAND OF WOUNDED CONGRESSWOMAN

Certifying her reputation as queen of the “gets” — especially now that Barbara Walters is, for all intents and purposes, out of the competition — Diane Sawyer has landed the first interview with Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. ABC said that the interview will air as a special edition of […]

MORE CHARGES FLY OVER POLITICAL “VITRIOL” IN WAKE OF SHOOTINGS

With few facts available to them, political pundits on both the right and left continued to speculate on Monday about whether Jared Lee Loughner was inflamed by political rhetoric to carry out his shooting spree in Tucson on Saturday that left a federal judge and five others dead and 13 others, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle […]

RIGHT AND LEFT CROSS SWORDS OVER TUCSON KILLINGS

Remarks by a Pima County, AZ sheriff that broadcast “vitriol we hear inflaming the American public” may have pushed an unstable gunman over the edge and led to his shooting rampage in Tucson on Saturday have been denounced by the conservative commentators at whom they were apparently directed. At a news conference to discuss the […]