Over at OlbermannWatch, Robert Cox has posted an email exchange where MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann is given some “advice” on how he has been handling his stories on the “Countdown” program, specifically regarding voter fraud in this year’s Presidential election. On the other end of the emails is Tom Sileo, a Tribune broadcast news producer (he was not working for Tribune at the time of the correspondence), who takes Olbermann and some of his colleagues to task for shoddy - and biased - reporting and discussion on the network.
Sileo: I don’t agree with the approach your taking to this ’story’, plain and simple. I feel that you, David Shuster, and Chris Matthews have a documented bias against President Bush that compromises your work. The poor ratings for MSNBC may prove that millions of others share my assessment. If the three of you approached your work more like Tim Russert, who knows how far MSNBC could climb.
To which Olbermann replies:
The poor ratings of MSNBC owe to incredibly unstable scheduling. For three years we did not have the same nightly line-up for more than six weeks successively. We’ve now gone over a year since the last change. The 6-9 PM ratings have doubled. I’m afraid tv success is much more of a function of constancy and style than it is of political tone.
While Olbermann is right that being on television in one slot for a little while helps in the ratings, it isn’t the only thing. Many of the MSNBC nighttime programming has been laughed off for some time now, irrelevant of what time things were on. It’s not so much a function of moving existing shows around because you feel like it, but more of having shows literally fail in their slot - or overall. Sure, the ratings have “doubled,” but what does that really mean in the grand scheme? That in another year, they’ll “double” again? Figuring out what viewers are moving to MSNBC is a question to ask as well. Are they taking newswatchers away from the competition (namely FOX News and CNN) or from regular television broadcasts, or are these “new” viewers who weren’t previously watching shows at that time? What are FOX’s latest ratings vs. MSNBC, anyway, like 4-6 times the number of viewers in the 8-10 timeframe? TVNewser reported on December 1 that while November was huge for MSNBC with regard to growth, they’re “gaining” on CNN but still lagging well behind FOX’s increases. It’s not just continuity, frankly - it’s content.
Some people argue that content isn’t king anymore - I’m not one of them.
