WHAC has the transcript…

The eagle eyes at CJR Online caught something funny during yesterday’s The Situation Room…

ICN, being a hockey addict, gives the Defense Department a pass on this…

UPDATE: Maybe it’s not so funny after all. As has been pointed out in the comments, the chances of an actual hockey game airing on TV at this time of year are so unlikely as to make it a near impossibility. What was probably being broadcast was a news channel’s report of either the signing of Wayne Gretzky as Coach of the Phoenix Coyotes or the re-instatement of Todd Bertuzzi from suspension for his crippling cheap shot of Colorado’s Steve Moore. CJR probably didn’t realize this and just took the what was being seen at face value…

Slate’s Daniel Gross anologizes the death of Peter Jennings in terms of the much talked about death of broadcast newtwork news…(via FTVLive)

In the last decade, the half-hour network newscasts have been written off more frequently than Tom, Peter, and Dan jetted off to cover summit meetings. Nobody watches them. We are too busy working, ferrying kids to soccer practice, and commuting to the exurbs to be home in time. With news available all day on cable and the Internet, the notion that a half-hour amalgam of over-produced, sound-bite-ridden reports, hosted by an old guy in an expensive suit, could make for an attractive program—let alone an attractive advertising vehicle—seems fanciful.

But in fact network newscasts are going to be dying for a long time, and dying quite profitably. Old-legacy media—newspapers and magazines and network TV newscasts backed by advertising—are going to be with us a lot longer than we think. And they’re going to be more profitable than hipper new media upstarts for some time to come. In a commercial culture that prizes youth and growth, the audiences of legacy media may be aging and shrinking. But they’re more than retaining their value.

ICN agrees. It’s one of the reasons MSNBC is in the position it’s in right now as NBC/Universal struggles to reconcile MSNBC’s purpose versus it’s far more profitable parent NBC Network News and particularly the Today Show. CNN and FOX don’t have such entanglements to tie them up like MSNBC has. Indeed FOX News’ historical problem hasn’t been competition between itself and FOX Broadcast but the inability to establish a sustained FOX News presence on the FOX Broadcast Network. Several news magazine shows have been attempted over the years, the last being “The Pulse”. All have failed. This may change if the recent stories of tighter integration between FOX Broadcast and FOX News does happen as a result of the departure of Lachlan Murdoch from News Corp.

UPDATE: As has been pointed out to ICN, FOX News Sunday has been on successfully for 9 years. ICN had been talking about M-Fr evening and prime time programming and had overlooked weekend programming. ICN regrets the error…

ICN had to go offline to go get its eyes checked out and didn’t have time to post the numbers for The Situation Room. So here they are rather belatedly…
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ICN isn’t going to draw too many conclusions from yesterday’s numbers outside of the obvious fact that FOX had another big day and night. The prime time numbers for the networks are skewed by the Peter Jennings story and Cosby’s debut. Sure she had a big debut night (bigger than The Situation’s 450,000 debut night number) but let’s see how things look at the end of the week before we start rendering judgements. The same thing applies to The Situation Room. Let’s see what happens when the novelty effect wears off…
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ICN blissfully slept through most of the shuttle pre-landing coverage (and a good thing too since the original landing time of 2 am PST got pushed back to 5 am). As ICN speculated, the shuttle did indeed land in California which meant Miles O’Brien was all dressed up at Kennedy Space Center with no shuttle landing to watch. But aside from that technicality CNN’s coverage was great. CNN continued with heavy coverage post landing throughout American Morning. In fact all three networks provided great coverage and analysis. FOX had Jon Scott anchoring the coverage and putting the story in everyman terms, “Still some business to be taken care of but America you can exhale. The shuttle is back on solid earth in that nighttime landing, dramatic video really. It looked like a ghost ship flying out of the dark sky over the Pacific there as it landed at Edwards Air Force Base at 5:12 pacific time …picture perfect landing….amazing stuff.” MSNBC and NBC again teamed up with Chris Jansing anchoring the coverage and though the analysis and coverage was first rate, ICN was troubled with the location NBC/MSNBC stuck Jansing in for this broadcast. With Imus doing his radio show in the main studio and Early Today broadcasting in some parts of the country, there was no available studio at MSNBC’s Secaucus location for Jansing to anchor from. So they stuck her in the newsroom apparently (might have been the control room) where the lighting isn’t as good and it gave the broadcast a “local news” feel and look to it. ICN wonders why didn’t NBC, which was simulcasting this broadcast, shift the broadcast to 30 Rock where there were plenty of studios available at that hour? FOX didn’t stick Scott in some News Corp. backroom. O’Brien was on location at Kennedy Space Center. It seems like such a trivial thing to be quibbling about set pieces but the truth is it is what the viewer sees when they watch the news.

While CNN continued on with coverage with O’Brien and FOX had Scott do his regular shift, MSNBC dropped Jansing after the initial coverage was over. When MSNBC Live started up the coverage was taken over by Robach and Meier.

But it could have been worse. CBS re-broadcast the east coast version of the Early Show on the west coast. Which meant that Julie Chen announced to West Coast viewers that the Shuttle was due to land in an hour….two hours after it had already landed. Oops…

At the end of last night’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann announced that he had surgery last week to have a benign tumor removed from the roof of his mouth. It wasn’t known at first the tumor was benign. Keith then went on to issue a powerful passionate plea for people to stop using Tobacco products. You could have heard a pin drop in the studio…

UPDATE: The full Transcript can be read after this jump…
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