Tomorrow the July numbers will be out officially. ICN decided to get a sneak peak out today and spent some time flexing our Excel muscles and practicing data entry.
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CNN today announced that it will air a special in collaboration with Sports Illustrated on the top 25 sports personalities of the last quarter century….

CNN asked the editors of Sports Illustrated to come up with the list of the top 25 sports characters, identifying the one aspect that made each of these athletes stand out from the crowd through their combination of personality and athletic skill.
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The rankings will also appear online, where viewers can rank the innovations themselves or provide their thoughts and memories on how these innovations changed their lives. This list and other topics pertaining to CNN’s 25th anniversary can be found at www.cnn.com/cnn25.

The special, hosted by HLN’s sports anchor Larry Smith will air on Sunday August 7th at 8 pm EST.

CNBC announced that its “CNBC On Assignment: Las Vegas, Inc.” special with Dylan Ratigan, which had been delayed, will now air on August 11th at 8 pm.

Friday pretty much continued Thursday’s trends if your network acronym was CNN or HLN. Grace continues to annihilate Paula Zahn Now and is rapidly approaching 1,000,000 viewers. HLN beat CNN in the prime time Demo and again came close to beating it in Prime Time total viewers. On the other hand MSNBC cratered. Its highest rated evening/primetime program was Hardball and that was only 207,000. It can’t get much worse when The Situation outperforms Countdown by doing nothing in the ratings. Even Scarborough was under 200,000. FOX continues to operate from on high, totally out of reach of any of its competition.
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MSNBC announced today that Lester Holt will host the special “The Law That Changed America”, on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, on Saturday and Sunday at 9 pm EST…

Millions of Americans are able to vote and live in the American dream because of the Voting Rights Act. “The Law That Changed America” places the Voting Rights Act into the perspective of modern day life and traces the historical ideas that inspired the Act, along with the actual events that lead to it. It also traces the people who helped make the dream of voting into a reality for all Americans, despite race or educational background.

“The Law That Changed America” includes a variety of voices ranging from politicians to musicians who share their thoughts on the history of the Voting Rights Act. These contributors include Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill); Former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman; Rapper Chuck D of the Rock the Vote Board of Directors; Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill); James Horton, prominent African-American historian; Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Sen. Harold Ford (D-Tenn); Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga); Michael Beschloss, presidential historian and NBC News analyst; Loretta and Linda Sanchez, the first Latino sisters to serve in Congress; and Harvard University professor and author of “The Right to Vote” Alexander Keyssar.

FTVLive today comes out swinging on the Tucker Carlson switch…

MSNBC is trying to act like this was in the plans all along, of course anyone that has worked in TV News longer than 5 minutes knows that is total bull****. Carlson’s ratings have been awful. MSNBC spent millions promoting the show and the return has been awful.

ICN would agree in as much as the 9pm hour wasn’t going to work for Carlson. All one has to do is take a look at the ratings. The show premiered at 450,000 viewers and then sank like a rock the next night to the 150-200,000 level and has stayed there since. Usually there’s a gradual drop-off in viewers after a premiere, as was the case with Donahue. Such sudden swings are a bit unusual. In the case of The Situation people tuned in the first night, didn’t like what they saw apparently, and left never to return. So the switch is a no-confidence vote in the show at the 9 pm timeslot, but not necessarily a no-confidence vote in the format of the show itself because as far as anyone knows the format isn’t being tweaked. Yet.

There are two open questions that can’t be answered yet. One is whether the news of the switch will tar the show with the “damaged goods” label and keep people from tuning in at the later hour. So far the reaction in the press to the switch has been for the most part restrained. Six weeks after all is not a very long time in cable news terms. The second open question is will the late night audience be more interested in that format than the 9pm audience was? FTV had an insider say that MSNBC’s thinking is to low-ball expectations in as much as maintaining the same ratings level as the 9pm hour would be considered good enough. On that score ICN would disagree. In order to be a success the show would have to draw more viewers in to show that the move was a good idea. Maintaining the status quo in the ratings at 11pm (which is only 11 on the East Coast…it’s Primetime everywhere else), particularly if Cosby’s show boosts the 9pm ratings significantly from The Situation’s 9 pm levels, would for all intents and purposes show that the program in its current form can’t work.

FTV is reporting that Rosey Edeh will be leaving NBC/MSNBC and returning to Canada and says her last day is August 12th…

TVNewser called it “awe-inspiring” and said that “Host Chris Jansing, primetime specials EP David Kelley, director Carrie Wysocki and senior producer Helen Young should get bonuses…”

ICN, being a hard core space junkie, is a bit more jaded. The special probably did as much as it could with the amount of time it had. It was a great primer for someone who didn’t have an in-depth knowledge of the subject. Even the more knowledgeable had reason to tune in to listen to Gene Cernan recount his time in space. But it would be impossible to properly hit all the areas of U.S. manned space activity in only an hour. MSNBC would have had to do a series of documentaries on the subject in order to accomplish that. As a result some areas of the space program didn’t get as prominent a mention as maybe they should have. This was particularly true for Skylab, which was a fixture of U.S. space activity in the 70s and early 80s. ICN would have loved to have heard a Skylab astronaut and an International Space Station astronaut compare “war stories”.

What the special did do very well is convey the feelings of some of the people involved in the program and put the story in to human terms without getting hung up on techno speak. And it did a good job of boiling down what is admittedly a very expansive subject into a form that would fit the time alloted for it. MSNBC doesn’t do a lot of in house specials but the ones they have done have all been first rate. ICN hopes MSNBC will continue this habit…