I had wondered where this bit in Washington Whispers had come from:
Is Washington already bored with new Senate star Barack Obama ? In his two Sunday talk show appearances this month, the programs finished dead last in the all important Washington market. “He’s Sunday poison,” says a TV exec. But Obama’s office says national TV viewing figures show that his appearances helped This Week and Face the Nation gain a second-place finish to NBC’s Meet the Press. And his September 11 This Week appearance turned out to have had the show’s second-best audience, next to a February interview of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “The national numbers speak for themselves,” says Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. “This is proof that the so-called skinny kid with the funny name from Chicago’s South Side can go toe to toe with the bodybuilding governor of the Golden State, and that was when Arnold was popular!”
Besides being typical Washington centric BS from inside the beltway, it turns out there are some fingerprints all over it:
In fact, there’s actually only one network who pushes D.C. market numbers to the exclusion of all others: that would be Fox’s D.C. spokesman Paul Schur, who most Mondays quickly sends around the overnight ratings for the local market (where Fox does very well) and ignores the larger national ratings (where Fox does pretty poorly).
Given that background, dollars to donuts, that “Washington Whispers” column came out of lunch the two Pauls had together at Chef Geoff’s last Wednesday. So then we’re left with this thought: Pushing an item about how a Democratic Senator is “Sunday poison” isn’t really the job of a network spokesperson.
Why is Fox doing the job of Bill Frist’s press secretary? There’s a thin line between network sour grapes and politically-motivated backstabbing.
There’s another oddity in the whole thing–why would anyone expect one Senator to carry the ratings? It seems to me the whole thing points out that Obama is attracting an audience in places that matter most–where voters are.
How naive! DC is the only thing that matters! 🙂
As far as advertising is concerned on the Sunday news programs the only audience that matters is the 535 members of Congress and the 20,000 people or so working on politics and policy in and around the Beltway. How do I know? I’ve participated in focus groups there. Focus groups are exclusively made up of Cong. staffers, trade association staffers and think tank types.