Of Ratings and Rantings

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 9:38 AM

I bet you've been sitting around wondering, how's Katie doing in the ratings?

Really? Well, maybe it's just me.

Anyway, the folks at CBS are quite happy with the latest Nielsen numbers. But the folks at NBC may be even happier.

Katie Couric won the ratings war for the first two weeks after taking the anchor chair. But she lost the lead last week to Brian Williams and "NBC Nightly News," who has been on top since taking over for Tom Brokaw.

But the good news for the "CBS Evening News" is with the initial hype subsiding, Couric has lifted the perennial also-ran into a solid second place, 492,000 viewers behind Brian Williams's "NBC Nightly News" and 110,000 ahead of Charlie Gibson's "World News" at ABC. Compared with the previous week, NBC was up 5 percent, ABC up 1 percent and CBS off 2 percent.

But CBS's preferred comparison -- to the same week a year ago -- shows Couric's newscast up by 708,000 and NBC and ABC each losing more than 1 million viewers. (That's for the first four nights of the week.)

And in the 25-54 group that advertisers obsess over, there was--drumroll--a three-way tie.

Lady and gentlemen, we have a horse race.

Speaking of ratings, USA Today's Peter Johnson has an analysis of how to get cable ratings in prime time:

"Ranting helps.

"Fox News Channel was first to tap into this a decade ago when Bill O'Reilly began to sound off about his pet peeves. He is now the most popular talk-show host on cable. Others have since joined in, and their ratings have increased.

"Lou Dobbs, CNN's formerly staid business news anchor, has been railing against illegal immigration for three years.

"On Headline News, former prosecutor Nancy Grace goes after defense attorneys as a self-styled crime-victims advocate.

"And at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann lately has begun sounding off on the Bush administration."

Speaking of Keith, who has become more passionate and opinionated in his commentaries, he takes a break from blasting Bill O'Reilly and rips Chris Wallace for his "Fox News Sunday" interview of Clinton. And then he says:

"Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so?

"That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie 'Wag The Dog.'

"Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton's judgment.

"Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri--the future attorney general--echoed Coats.

"Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

"And of course, were it true Clinton had been 'distracted' by the Lewinsky witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?

"Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?

"Who corrupted the political media? . . .

"Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was, 'All Monica All The Time'?"

Um, and who featured the Monica crisis more than 200 straight nights on "The Big Show with Keith Olbermann," and then quit MSNBC in disgust?

Fox replayed excerpts of the interview about a zillion times yesterday--it's been downloaded on YouTube at least 800,000 times--and Condi Rice is punching back hard:

"Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making 'flatly false' claims that the Bush administration didn't lift a finger to stop terrorism before the 9/11 attacks," says the New York Post , which also happens to be owned by Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch.

"Rice hammered Clinton, who leveled his charges in a contentious weekend interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel, for his claims that the Bush administration 'did not try' to kill Osama bin Laden in the eight months they controlled the White House before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"'The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false -- and I think the 9/11 commission understood that,' Rice said during a wide-ranging meeting with Post editors and reporters."

Bill Kristol defends his Fox colleague:

"Let's do a thought experiment. Perhaps Bill Clinton, an experienced and sophisticated politician, knew what he was doing when he made big news by 'losing his temper' in his interview with Chris Wallace. Perhaps Clinton's aides knew what they were doing when they publicized the interview by providing their own transcript to a left-wing website as soon as possible Friday evening, and then pre-spun reporters late Friday and Saturday. Maybe it was just damage control. Or maybe Clinton did what he wanted to do when he indignantly defended himself, blasted the Bush administration, and attacked Fox News. What could Clinton have been seeking to accomplish? . . .

"In the Fox interview, and in other recent interviews (Meet the Press, the New Yorker), Clinton has shown himself well aware of Republican efforts (engineered by the dastardly Karl Rove) to paint Democrats as unreliable in the war on terror. Clinton would have known that these were doing some damage to Democrats, and that Bush and Rove have had a few good weeks on this issue. And he would know that the Democrats haven't fought back well (e.g., they're now in a difficult position on the Bush-McCain detainees legislation).

"In this interview, Clinton rallied Democrats. He reminded them of their talking points on Bush's alleged passivity in his first eight months in office (remember Richard Clarke!), and on the alleged distraction posed by Iraq from the more worthwhile war in Afghanistan . . .

"Chris Wallace stood up to him. Will others? Will his next interviewer raise the same set of questions? Will they be willing to take the criticism of being 'conservative hit men' or part of the vast, Fox-centered right-wing conspiracy? Bullying and intimidation sometimes work."

Ann Althouse : "Now that I've seen the reaction on the left, I'm convinced that Clinton went on the show planning to act the way he did. It wasn't Chris Wallace's specific question that set him off. He decided in advance to go on Fox News and unleash an attack on Fox News as soon as when he saw an opening. But he jumped too eagerly at what wasn't really an opening and he jumped weirdly."

Whether deliberate or not, Clinton's outburst has changed the debate, as this Boston Globe makes clear:

"President Bill Clinton's angry defense of his administration's efforts to eliminate Osama bin Laden has set off a new round of charges about whether Democrats or Republicans are to blame for allowing the Al Qaeda leader to remain a national security threat for more than a decade.

"Just five weeks before congressional elections, Democrats have seized on the former president's angry retort, during a television interview Sunday, to accuse the Bush administration of dropping the ball that Clinton handed over , while the GOP insists Clinton's defensiveness on the air proves its contention that he was asleep at the switch."

And speaking of the aforementioned Bill O'Reilly , "I don't get invited to parties," he tells Newsweek.

" If you had to spend an afternoon with Keith Olbermann, Al Franken or Frank Rich, whom would you pick? "I wouldn't choose any of them. There is nothing on earth that could make me engage any of those people."

More controversy for Nancy Grace, courtesy of Daily News columnists Rush & Molloy :

"Last year, Hyperion published Grace's book 'Objection! How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System.'

"Grace was happy to hype the book, which spent five weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. She was less eager to draw attention to the fact that she'd lifted huge, verbatim passages in the book from that newspaper . . .

"Sources say Hyperion president Robert S. Miller was willing to accept Grace's claim that it was an "inadvertent" error. But he insisted that Grace alert The Times in a letter that promised the 'error' would be fixed in future printings.

"Word is, Grace refused to write that letter -- provoking Hyperion's lawyers to remind her that, under her contract, she was responsible to hold the publisher harmless if The Times sued over copyright infringement."

Will the Tribune Co., which has been demanding big cutbacks at papers like the L.A. Times, go private? For that, we turn to its namesake newspaper, the Chicago Tribune :

"Sources with knowledge of the company's thinking say management's favored solution would be to spin off many of Tribune's roughly two dozen television stations in a tax-advantaged transaction, unload several of the smaller papers and take the rest of the company private in a leveraged buyout."

Yesterday I mentioned Tom Edsall's critique of liberal media bias in an interview with Hugh Hewitt. Here's the transcript if you want to check out the whole thing.

Time's Michael Weisskopf describes in moving detail how he lost his hand in Iraq.

Just when the "Jewish" controversy seems to be dying down, Salon finds three former college football teammates who say George Allen routinely used the N-word.

Allen strongly denies ever using the odious term. The New York Times , meanwhile, finds another acquaintance who says the same thing, and confirms the account of one of the football players:

"Two former acquaintances of Senator George Allen said Monday that he used racist slurs in the 1970's and 1980's, a development that compounded accusations of racial insensitivity that have dogged his re-election campaign in Virginia. Mr. Allen denied that he had ever used such words."

Tony Snow is helping raise money for the Republicans. If another White House secretary has ever done that, I can't recall it. But then, no other presidential spokesman has been a former talk show host.

Are the Republicans worried about the midterms? Slate's John Dickerson has a secret source:

"I was one of a small group of reporters who ate lunch with a Republican congressman. He was thoughtful and blunt about the problems that face his party in the coming election--which is why I can't name him. He has criticized the conduct of the war in Iraq in public and to the president in private. He believes that if there is not a change in strategy soon, Americans will not support a war strategy that he characterized as 'just stay and let American kids die.'

"This member says many of his GOP colleagues have a similar view and privately articulate sharp criticisms and suggestions for new action. But they're not going to say anything in public now. Why? They don't want to hurt the GOP's election chances by appearing to criticize the president. 'Reality has been suspended for a moment,' says the member. 'Republicans cannot speak out publicly on this issue right now.'"

Not that liberals are thrilled with their side. Arianna is up in arms over a Roll Call article that's "all about how Democrats have decided that the way to win in November is -- I kid you not -- to make the economy the central issue of the campaign.

"'We've got to go on the offensive,' explained a senior Democratic aide, 'and keep our eye on the ball -- and that's the economy.'

"'We're not going to win 15 seats on the war in Iraq,' said another Democratic staffer, insisting it is the economy that will, in the words of Roll Call, 'bring the party across the goal line.' Sen. Debbie Stabenow is quoted as saying the 2006 election 'is all about jobs.'

"And, in a memo sent to Democratic staffers, the party's Senate leadership claimed 'while Iraq may be high among the concerns of the American people, it is a distant reality in comparison to the day to day challenges many families face filing their gas tanks, paying for college, saving for retirement and securing a job.'

"A distant reality? Oh. My. God.

"In poll after poll, voters place Iraq well above the economy when asked which issue will most affect their vote this year. And when you combine concerns about the war with concerns about terrorism/national security, it's the economy that is 'a distant reality.'

"Yet Democrats keep returning to the same domestic-issues-uber-alles thinking that cost them the elections in 2002 and 2004. They can't really believe that people are more interested in raising the minimum wage, middle class tax relief, and college affordability than they are in who's going to keep them from being blown up, can they?"

Kos picks up on Ms. Huffington's argument:

"See, that's why I don't think we're going to win back the House or Senate. Because you can always trust Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

"For the record, we heard this in 2002. We heard it in 2004. I gave the argument the benefit of the doubt those years. I think I actually bought it in 2002. But apparently our vaunted leadership in DC is incapable of learning lessons."

Could Barack Obama really be a presidential candidate next time around? Dick Polman weighs the pluses and minuses:

"Upside: He's a fresh face, less than two years in the Senate at this point, and therefore unencumbered by the usual Washington baggage; his base is Chicago, a major Democratic fundraising hub; Illinois abuts Iowa, which means that, during the Iowa caucuses, he can flood the zone with volunteers; he can potentially galvanize the party's African-American voters, while potentially drawing some white 'values voters,' with his frank talk about the importance of religion in politics (last June, he rebuked 'liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical'). He can do the red-meat rhetoric, but he doesn't get personal (on Sunday: 'I don't think that George Bush is a bad man'), which means that he's not likely to polarize our politics any further. And did I mention his charisma?

"Downside: Two years ago at this moment, the guy was a state senator in Springfield, Illinois. He has run only once in a statewide race, winning his '04 Senate seat in a landslide only because his first GOP opponent, Jack Ryan, had to quit the race after seamy details surfaced about his divorce; and because the replacement opponent, right-wing radio host Alan Keyes, has long been a national joke. It's also tough to think of a single time when he has taken a risky public stand against the Republicans on Capitol Hill; there was a brief tiff with John McCain over an ethics issue that nobody outside of Washington remembers. Indeed, he is so new to the national scene that some Democrats have no idea how he'd react if or when the Republicans feel compelled to try to dent his halo (either by cherry-picking his Senate votes, highlighting some inevitable Senate compromises, or simply Swift Boating him)."

In other words, he doesn't have much of a record to shoot at, but he doesn't have much of a record. I can't see him running this time around.