Tag Archives: glenn-reynolds

Sub-19 and Sub-5: Big Three Nets’ Drew Under 19 Million Last Week; CBS, at Under 5 Mil, Ties All-Time Low

They’ll have all sorts of excuses (but only if asked) about why it happened: It’s because they had a lot of guest anchors last week, it was hot, summer vacation season is still on (though lots of kids around in Greater Cincinnati were already back in school by last Wednesday), cable is killing us, blah-blah, etc., etc. But the Big Three networks won’t be able to avoid the fact that their ongoing decline reached a painful low last week of 18.82 million average viewers. Here is the graphic that appeared this morning at ABC’s lipstick-on-a-pig blog post : I don’t know whether that’s an all-time low, but Kevin Allocca at Media Bistro, who hadn’t posted the full numbers as of the time of this post, has noted that one of those networks indeed scraped bottom last week: ‘CBS Evening News’ Ties All-Time Low The network newscast ratings for last week are in and “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” tied its all-time low in total viewers with an average of 4.89 million tuning in during the five days. The low was set last June, when ABC also hit its own low. (Ratings records date back to the 1991-’92 season.) It’s not unreasonable to believe that the Perky Ms. Couric’s pathetic performance might have more than a little to do with her compulsion to lecture us . Here is how the overall numbers compare to those from one and two years ago: Week of August 18, 2008 — 21.44 million Week of August 17, 2009 — 19.76 million Week of August 16, 2010 — 18.82 million This past week was down 4.8% from a year ago, and almost 14% from two years ago. NBC’s audience, which was a whisker shy of 9 million two years ago, has fallen 17.5%. Gee, do you think that might have something to do with Brian Williams’s open contempt for the Tea Party Movement? Though the comparison isn’t apples to apples because the 2010 numbers are for a summertime week, the nets’ average audience during calendar 2005 was about 27 million . There’s little doubt their 5-year decline is in the neighborhood of 20, and possibly much more. The U.S. population grew by about 4% during that five-year period. As Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds might say, though usually in a more positive vein: ” Faster, please .” Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com .

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Sub-19 and Sub-5: Big Three Nets’ Drew Under 19 Million Last Week; CBS, at Under 5 Mil, Ties All-Time Low

Democracy, Yecch: Does NPR Really Want to Slam the ‘Tyranny of Constituency’?

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit mocked the curious turn of phrase National Public Radio Senior Washington Editor Ron Elving used on his Watching Washington blog to defend a recent NPR survey showing dire straits for the Democrats in the fall. Beneath the surface, the NPR poll was all about the tyranny of constituency , the down and dirty of serving the folks back home. House districts (and states’ legislative districts) tend to be intricately drawn demarcations of the folks back home… That’s why the NPR survey, done by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Republican counterpart Glen Bolger, focused on the 60 Democratic districts likeliest to be lost to Republicans this fall. The NPR survey also included ten marginal GOP districts that Obama won in 2008. What they found in these 70 districts was that respondents favored Republicans over Democrats, 49 to 41, and President Obama drew 40 percent approval and 54 percent disapproval. No wonder NPR-loving liberals were unhappy. Elving’s “tyranny” phrase was a reflection on Joe Barton’s apology to BP:   The NPR poll shows why individual House members wind up being more loyal to their own jigsaw piece of the national puzzle than to the national puzzle itself. Only their own micro-constituency can vote for them (or against them). And at the same time, the pressure on an individual member from a dominant industry or other interest within the district can be irresistible. That’s why Barton, the Texas Republican, thinks not only about suburban Dallas-Fort Worth voters but also about the oil and gas industry, which made him the No. 1 recipient of its campaign fund contributions in the House.  His wider message sounded more Gergenesque: that the “tyranny” of constituency prevents compromise, just as partisan gerrymandering has made elections less competitive and more ideologically polarized.  But the “tyranny” that most offends conservatives is that NPR can take our tax dollars and please their “constituency” of congressional liberals with an aggressive anti-conservative bias (right down to the website’s cartoons ).

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Democracy, Yecch: Does NPR Really Want to Slam the ‘Tyranny of Constituency’?