It was a semi lackluster evening unless your call letters were CNN. HLN, FNC, and MSNBC’s shows, with one or two notable exceptions, were either flat or back to pre-Katrina levels, depending on how you want to look at it. Nancy Grace was limp, coming in under 500,000 for the live show. Only MSNBC’s Scarborough Country showed any signs or bucking the post Katrina downtrend that night for the network. FNC’s numbers were either good or dissapointing depending on the program. If you were O’Reilly, you had a good night. If you were Hannity & Colmes or Greta, maybe not so good.

CNN on the other hand was still way up from its pre Katrina levels. Larry King Live beat Hannity & Colmes. You read that right, a CNN program beat an FNC program in primetime. Yes, I had to do a double take myself. I don’t put a lot of long term significance into this event though. Unless it’s the start of something. But there’s no way to know at this point (though history would suggest it shouldn’t be)…
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TVNewser notes MSNBC missing an important New Orleans news conference today. This is at least the 2nd time in the last two weeks MSNBC has totally missed a key presser. The last one was Dick Cheney’s comments a little over a week ago. I don’t know if I buy the “Steve Capus should be embarrassed” anonymous crack though. The guy has only been on the job a little over a couple of weeks and it is supposed to be just temporary. Rick Kaplan on the other hand….

Bruce Bartlett writes a letter to Romenesko that comments on what I consider one of the tawdrier sides of the cable news channels. Read the whole thing….

Once again, I just got off the phone with a booker for one of the cable news channels who wanted me to play the role of the knee-jerk Bush supporter and I had to decline. Although I am a conservative who generally supports Republican policies and generally opposes those that come from Democrats, I am uncomfortable being locked into that position. I also don’t think it makes for very good television.

I understand that news shows want to show both sides — or perhaps I should say two sides — to controversial issues, lest they appear biased towards one position. But why must this always take the form of a debate? Why can’t they interview a person with one position separately and then interview someone else with another position in another segment? Wouldn’t this be a better way of achieving balance than by always having a debate?

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Terence J. Kivlan in the Staten Island Advance has a profile of Fox News Channel’s James Rosen (via TVNewser)

James Rosen sensed he had found his niche as an ex-New Yorker in his very first job out of journalism school — at WREX-TV in Rockford, Ill., the country’s 137th ranking media market.

“One of the guys I worked with said — ‘You’re from Staten Island? … Cool!’” he explained recently. “I was so taken by that. In New York, all you get is condescension from the other boroughs when you come from Staten Island.”

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Xeni Jardin in Wired News writes about the technology that’s used to make CNN’s The Situation room happen…(wia WHAC)

Your impression when tuning in to CNN’s The Situation Room for the first time is likely to be, “Geez, there’s a lot going on here.”

There is. And much of it involves technologies familiar to internet regulars, but mostly unheard of in the context of TV newscasts.

Throughout the daily, three-hour show, a split video wall behind host Wolf Blitzer displays up to six separate feeds, often topically unrelated to each other.

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The New York Times’ Alex Mindlin writes up MSNBC.com’s August win….(via Romenesko)

This August, MSNBC.com drew the most visitors of any news Web site, receiving 26.6 million unique hits, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The site has been first among news sites four times since March by this measure, beating stalwarts like the Web sites of CNN and The New York Times. (Ranked by raw page views, MSNBC.com was third this August, below CNN.com and Yahoo News. The difference in rankings suggests that CNN.com and Yahoo News readers view more pages per visit, but the MSNBC site gets more visitors over all.)

All this suggests a question: Why is MSNBC.com doing so well if its parent perennially trails other TV news channels?

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TV Week’s Editorial praises CNN…

Anger and frustration over the handling of the Katrina relief effort have been so overwhelming in the weeks since the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast that one of the government’s many blunders almost slipped under the radar. But when officials tried to restrict journalists’ coverage of recovery efforts, a single news organization, CNN, stood up to the bullies and reminded them that the First Amendment still guarantees the public has a right to know what’s going on.

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Michelle Greppi in TV Week writes about the long term commitment by the media in New Orleans…

In TV news, it’s important to be first, and NBC News was the first to declare it had formally established a bureau in New Orleans within WDSU-TV, the scrappy Hearst-Argyle-owned NBC affiliate that operated without electricity until last Tuesday.

Hours later CNN announced that it found space in downtown New Orleans, where it will establish a bureau. It was not clear when CNN will begin moving its equipment into the space, which, a spokeswoman said, is not attached to a TV facility.

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David Carr in The New York Times writes about ways the media didn’t just report the news but rumor as well…

But many instances in the lurid libretto of widespread murder, carjacking, rape, and assaults that filled the airwaves and newspapers have yet to be established or proved, as far as anyone can determine. And many of the urban legends that sprang up - the systematic rape of children, the slitting of a 7-year-old’s throat - so far seem to be just that. The fact that some of these rumors were repeated by overwhelmed local officials does not completely get the news media off the hook. A survey of news reports in the LexisNexis database shows that on Sept. 1, the news media’s narrative of the hurricane shifted.

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Jeff Meisner in the Puget Sound Business Journal writes about the new strategy of MSNBC.com…

Profits aside, MSNBC has been locked in a stalemate with Yahoo! News and CNN.com for the last two years in terms of Web traffic, Web page views and the average time users spend at the site. (See accompanying chart.) And that’s not where MSNBC and Tillinghast want to remain.

Starting in June, Tillinghast refocused the unit on four areas he believes will drive more traffic to the site, enabling MSNBC to break away from the competition — search engine optimization, content syndication, content personalization and video.

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