TVNewser today proclaims CNBC’s On Assignment “a hit”…

Following the success of last week’s “Las Vegas Inc.” on CNBC, should we expect more documentaries on CNBC primetime?
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The CNBC on Assignment special was CNBC’s top performer in primetime on Thursday, August 11. It averaged 243,000 viewers at 8pm and 105,000 at 11pm. In the 25-54 demo, the show delivered 89,000 viewers, 25% above the meager quarter to date time period average.

ICN doesn’t agree. Sure maybe by CNBC standards the series is drawing higher than other shows in the past did at that time slot. But let’s cut through the spin here. The show still came in 5th place amongst the cable news channels at 7pm…
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FOX News keeps operating on a whole other plane of existence versus the competition. Its primetime average of 2.5 million is impressive. The best CNN could muster is less than .75 of one million. Thats how wide the gap often is now in primetime between FOX and CNN (never mind MSNBC)…it’s not being measured in hundreds of thousands….but millions. Larry King bounced back from the past two days lower than normal ratings (was Costas still subbing?). The Situation Room continues its lateral movement. Scarborough has been the workhorse for MSNBC this week. It beat the Nancy Grace repeat last night, which doesn’t happen hardly ever. Cosby continues to fluctuate. The Situation had good and bad news. The good news is the numbers are up this week. The bad news is it’s not because of Tucker Carlson…he’s been out all week.
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Greta Van Susteren blogs on GretaWire that she’s on her way to Philadelphia…

The story that has grabbed our attention is that of a missing pregnant woman — LaToyia Figueroa. We reported on her weeks ago when she disappeared, but there’s still no sign of her and it is hard to understand how a pregnant woman vanishes into thin air. As you may know, murder is one of the leading causes of death of pregnant women so of course our level of optimism for her is growing dimmer and dimmer as the weeks pass. But, maybe we will get lucky. Who would have guessed that Elizabeth Smart (search) would return alive and healthy? LaToyia is now six months pregnant and leaves behind another child (which is another reason why murder seems to be the cause of her disappearance.)

ICN wonders what those who have been screaming about Missing White Women syndrome in the media lately, and who have singled Van Susteren and her time in Aruba out in particular, will say about this? For the uninformed, Figueroa is not white…

Paul Farhi in the Washington Post writes about the images that have been appearing on the cable networks over the Isreali pullout from Gaza….

Israel’s abandonment of the Gaza Strip this month is, of course, one more chapter in a long history of turmoil in the Middle East. But from the way it looked on TV yesterday, it’s a new generation that’s doing all the struggling. Maybe all the older people are just too tired.
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The most personal and richly evocative sequence of the day may have been captured by Fox News Channel live on its “Fox and Friends” morning program (and repeated throughout the day). As reporter Jennifer Griffin and crew followed from a few feet away, an Israeli soldier smashed in the front door of a house and came face to face with a family of settlers, who gave their name as Gross. Then — with an unseen producer’s voice yelling “Stay with it! Stay with it!” — Fox’s camera caught the family’s angry faces and reactions. The father recounted, in New York-inflected English, how his firstborn son had been “murdered in cold blood” not long after the family arrived in Gaza 32 years ago. His distraught wife turned her attention to the soldiers flooding into her living room. “They didn’t stop these rockets from falling,” she said. “Now they say they are here to protect us. Is there any sympathy in the world? I don’t understand this.”
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MSNBC offered one brief picture that conveyed a note of finality and perhaps a sense of inevitability about the events of yesterday. As a network camera watched, a settler with tears in his eyes carried off the Torah that had been lodged in the settlement’s soon-to-be-abandoned synagogue. Standing by, an Israeli soldier dipped his head in prayer, kissed his hand in a traditional gesture of reverence, and reached out to touch the passing scrolls.

The New York Times’ Robin Finn has a profile of the man in charge of the FOX News Ticker at the FOX News building, Mike Santangelo…

The Big Zipper, as Mr. Santangelo calls it, is 163 feet long by 28 inches high, a veritable information highway that spits a mix of the day’s headlines (global, national, local and zany: if he unearths a record $68 million bank heist in South America or a river in Italy polluted by $400,000 worth of cocaine per day, into the script it goes) in encapsulated doses. No story takes longer to tell than it takes a person to walk a block.

“This is the Fox face,” he says. “We’ll give you the news, we’ll give it to you straight, but we’ll give it with flair. I try to put a snap on it. Any story can be done in three lines,” he claims. He didn’t always feel that way.

The AP’s Brendan Farrington writes about Joe Scarborough’s future, one that may either be a continuation of his TV gig or a return to politics….(via TVN)

Scarborough said Wednesday that he has already talked with Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and plans to meet with Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and White House officials next week about whether to get into the race to unseat Democrat Bill Nelson.

“I’ve told everybody I’ll keep an open mind. I’m happy with NBC, NBC is happy with me. They’ve offered me a new contract. That’s sitting on the table,” Scarborough said.

Just when Rick Kaplan thought his primetime lineup was set in stone…..

WHAC beats everyone including Romenesko to the punch by noting Alan B. Kreuger’s New York Times article on a new study by Stefano DellaVigna of UC Berkeley and Ethan Kaplan of the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University on whether FOX News Channel affects voter behavior.

Because Fox News started just before the presidential election in 1996 and was hardly available at the time of that election, a major question is whether the introduction of Fox in a community raised the likelihood that residents voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore in the 2000 election, as compared with the share who voted for Bob Dole over Bill Clinton in the (pre-Fox) 1996 election.

Disregarding third-party candidates, Professors DellaVigna and Kaplan found that towns that offered Fox by 2000 increased their vote share for the Republican presidential candidate by 6 percentage points (to 54 percent, from 48 percent) from 1996 to 2000, while those that did not offer Fox increased theirs by an even larger 7 percentage points (to 54 percent, from 47 percent).

When they made statistical adjustments to hold constant differences in demographic characteristics and unemployment, and looked at differences in voting behavior between towns that introduced and did not introduce Fox within the same Congressional district, the availability of Fox had a small and statistically insignificant effect on the increase in the share of votes for the Republican candidate. Thus, the introduction of Fox news did not appear to have increased the percentage of people voting for the Republican presidential candidate. A similar finding emerged for Congressional and senatorial elections.Voter turnout also did not noticeably change within towns that offered Fox by 2000 compared with those that did not.