(by Lisa Benson via Slate via FishbowlDC)

FNC’s Shepard Smith continues to anchor live from the sight of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this evening. Smith described for viewers what the situation in Minnesota is today:

Back live here in Minneapolis where so many people just about 24 hours ago actually saw the bridge fall. The sights and sounds they will soon not likely forget.

Lots of people in this city are alive today, but sadly they could not save them all and one of the most heartbreaking things we learned this day was that some of the victims who were trapped under all of that debris asked the rescue workers to say goodbye to their loved ones for them.

FNC will be airing a one hour Geraldo Rivera special on the Bridge Collapse this weekend. “Tragedy at Rush Hour: The Minnesota Bridge Collapse” will air at 9pm ET on Saturday night.

Cable News Daily Ratings for August 1, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 1,116,000 viewers
CNN – 812,000 viewers
MSNBC – 368,000 viewers
CNBC – 220,000 viewers
HLN – 249,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 3,288,000 viewers
CNN – 2,446,000 viewers
MSNBC – 965,000 viewers
CNBC – 142,000 viewers
HLN – 559,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 361,000 viewers
CNN –323,000 viewers
MSNBC – 164,000 viewers
CNBC – 69,000 viewers
HLN – 110,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 1,021,000 viewers
CNN – 1,009,000 viewers
MSNBC – 465,000 viewers
CNBC – a scratch with 51,000 viewers
HLN – 253,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends –814,000 viewers (308,000)
American Morning – 342,000 viewers (124,000)
MSNBC Live (7-8am) – 243,000 viewers (55,000)
Robin & Co. – 208,000 viewers (98,000)
(more…)

FNC won the 25-54 Demo from 7-9pm. CNN won the 25-54 Demo from 9pm-3am. FNC had the most Total Viewers from 7pm-11pm. CNN had the most Total Viewers from 11pm-3am. Obviously viewership declined among all the networks as the night wore on…

(ratings based on Live+SD 3am-3am numbers)

UPDATE: More ratings information

8-11pm Primetime Ratings (numbers are Live)

FNC - 3,288,000 viewers (1,021,000)
CNN 2,446,000 viewers (1,009,000)
MSNBC 965,000 viewers (465,000)

FNC peaked with 3,743,000 viewers in the 8pm hour, where Shepard Smith anchored, pre-empting The O’Reilly Factor.

Ratings from the 7:30 start of the disaster coverage (numbers are Live)…

7:30-11pm
FNC - 3,087,000 (955,000)
CNN - 2,226,000 (915,000)
MSNBC - 894,000 (423,000)

I had been waiting for some sort of relaunch/renovation of the MSNBC anchor website to take place before the Guilty Pleasures promo videos went live. I had heard the web launch was to happen around the week of August 13th. However, the videos apparently went live today. I’ve only found one so far. It’s for Contessa Brewer; solitaire addict…

MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer doesn’t even want her husband to know she’s obsessed with computer solitaire. She also loves sunshine, ice cream and bloody marys before noon on Sundays.

Bloody Marys before noon on Sundays? Obviously, this ritual must have started happening after MSNBC stopped having Brewer anchor the Sunday Noon newscast. I hope. (< === humor)

UPDATE: So far, videos for Susan Filan, Alex Witt, Jackie Meretsky, and JJ Ramberg are online.

Foxnews.com’s website has a photo montage of the Minneapolis bridge disaster…

MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer is on the scene reporting on the disaster.

NBC’s Brian Williams has been appearing from Minneapolis off and on throughout the day on MSNBC…

FNC’s Rick Leventhal is blogging the story from Minneapolis…

12:30 CT, Minneapolis, MN

The Red Cross has set up a family support center at the Holiday Inn downtown. There are grief counselors and clergy in a ballroom, sitting with relatives who are worried sick over loved ones missing since the bridge collapsed.

Reporters and cameras are being kept outside, but some family members are coming out to talk about the waiting and worrying.

UPDATE: Brewer didn’t work in Minneapolis. It was Milwaukee. So I removed that information from the entry. I got a bad email tip. But it’s not the tipster’s fault as apparently Alex Witt had mistakenly said on the air that Brewer worked in Minneapolis. Still I should have caught this error before it went out because I knew that Brewer had worked in Milwaukee but for some inexplicable reason I had a brain freeze.

Last night The O’Reilly Factor was to air an interview with Senator Chris Dodd over the Daily Kos bruhaha. Rumor is it got incendiary. But due to the bridge collapse that interview was postponed until tonight. Dodd put out a press release on the interview…

Presidential Candidate Chris Dodd today stood up to Bill O’Reilly’s tireless attacks on the progressive blogosphere and defended the democratic right to free speech in his appearance on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. O’Reilly had launched a smear campaign against the political blog DailyKos, by selectively choosing a handful of objectionable comments out of the millions posted on the site and attempting to characterize the entire community with them. Dodd successfully exposed O’Reilly’s hypocrisy, referring to offensive comments O’Reilly has made in the past including when O’Reilly suggested that Al Qaeda “go ahead” and “blow up” Coit Tower in San Francisco. [The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly, 11/8/05]

“I hope that our discussion today reminds Bill that a free press is at the very heart of this nation’s values. The blogosphere is enormous - and to exploit such a tiny fraction of it in such a way is ludicrous, especially considering that Bill himself has said some things in the past that he may not want distorted,” said Dodd, after the show’s taping. “Democrats aren’t going to be lectured to about the crudeness of language or civility of discourse by Bill O’Reilly.”

FOX News Channel continues coverage from Minneapolis throughout the evening. Bill Hemmer, Shepard Smith, and Greta Van Susteren will all be providing reports from the scene.

- Shepard Smith kicks off tonight with “Fox Report,” where he will be speaking with witnesses to the disaster and family who still don’t know what happened to their loved ones.

- Trace Gallagher will be looking at the infrastructure issues with bridges in the nation, and the possibilities this could happen somewhere else.

- Bill O’Reilly will feature personal stories from Minneapolis regarding the tragedy last evening and will have updates from Minnesota on the latest developments.

- Hannity & Colmes will have an interview tonight with Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty

- Greta Van Susteren will broadcast “On the Record” live from Minneapolis, where she will provide an aerial view of Minneapolis to survey the damage from a helicopter

FNC’s Bill Hemmer interviewed 11 year old Olivia Reynolds, one of the children abroad the school bus that was on the bridge when it collapsed. When Hemmer asked if she could feel the bridge collapse, she said “It started to shake and all I knew was the bus started falling. I ducked down and didn’t move, but it was really jerky.” Hemmer went on to ask her what she was thinking as this all was happening. She responded, “I thought I was going to die.”

CNN has approved 96 I-Reports, including three videos, for use across its multiple networks and services. More than 20 have been published online. CNN has featured live beepers with I-Reporters, notably Mark LaCroix.

CNN launched its I-Report initiative one year ago. To date, more than 45,000 I-Reports have been submitted to CNN.

Associated Press initially reported the collapse story at 7:32 p.m. CNN’s first report followed at 7:35 p.m. (ET), with the first I-Report – a submission from Mark LaCroix – airing at 7:45 p.m. by.

An anonymous tipster notified CNN through its news tip hotline of the availability of video of the bridge collapsing just after 3:30a.m.(ET) today.

CNN: Special Investigations Unit to air a one-hour live special regarding infrastructure safety on Friday, Aug. 3, at 8 p.m. (ET). The program will feature investigative reporting from Soledad O’Brien, Drew Griffin, Jim Acosta and Ted Rowlands.

Anderson Cooper will anchor Anderson Cooper 360º live from Minneapolis tonight. On the evening of the bridge collapse, Cooper anchor his program continuing until 1 a.m. (ET).

American Morning began airing at 5 a.m. (ET) today with anchor John Roberts anchoring from Minneapolis.

Larry King Live this evening will feature Larry King interviewing Minnesota Sens. Amy Klobacher and Norm Coleman, as well as witnesses to the collapse.

Deployment: Approximately 75 personnel
(more…)

FNC’’s uReport has been providing additional perspective from viewers in Minneapolis. Since the story broke last night, viewers have been submitting dramatic photos and footage from the scene of the bridge collapse.

(more…)

CNN had Frederika Whitfield anchoring from 2-5 am when American Morning came on early. At 3am, FNC was apparently running tape from earlier in the breaking newscast before Fox and Friends started early. MSNBC had Christina Brown anchoring until 4am when it went to tape until 5am when Amy Robach came on to anchor for an hour until Morning Joe started.

As noted yesterday, FNC’s Gretchen Carlson came from Minnesota. So did Lauren Green. Both were brought in last night to give their thoughts on the tragedy…

Lauren Green

My mother just called me about 15 minutes ago, woke me up, and said ‘we’re ok’, I said what do you mean ‘we’re ok’. She said don’t you know about the bridge and immediately I woke up. I’m still in shock because my family has been calling saying everyone is ok. My mother told me that she had just been on the bridge earlier today during that construction, and she said ‘this is really bad. All this construction, all this rumbling, but thought nothing of it and then later today she turned on the news and saw that the bridge had just collapsed. I am in shock because I realize that in the space of a few hours, my mother might have been on that bridge. That’s how close this was to me.

Gretchen Carlson

This is a road that I have traveled probably hundreds of times since I was a kid there.

The New York Daily News’ David Hinckley writes about conservative radio hosts meeting with President Bush yesterday…

For the second year in a row, President Bush called some of his closest radio friends to the White House for an off-the-record briefing and discussion.

Mark Levin and Sean Hannity of WABC (770 AM) were among the 10 conservative talk-radio hosts who met with Bush in the West Wing yesterday, according to Talkers magazine.

The others were Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Hugh Hewitt, Scott Hennen, Bill Bennett, Michael Medved, Lars Larsen and Janet Parshall.

Running with a Reuters’ report that ends up being bogus. The AP’s David Bauder writes about the Reuters report that claimed a rescue mission was underway to free the Korean hostages in Afghanistan…

CNN’s Kiran Chetry, at 8:29 a.m., said that Reuters had reported that a rescue operation had started. Fox News Channel’s Steve Doocy said there were “some wire reports today that the army over there is dropping leaflets on towns saying, you know, you better get out because we are about to launch an operation to try to liberate these people.”

New York Business.com hinted at it on Tuesday. Today, the New York Times’ Louise Story writes about CNBC’s new branding campaign complete with video samples.

JUST in case Rupert Murdoch is wondering who watches CNBC — the business network that he plans to compete with this fall when he introduces a competitor, the Fox Business Network — a series of commercials starting today will tell him.

CNBC’s new advertising campaign features testimonials from chief executives and business leaders like Mel Karmazin of Sirius Satellite Radio and Herb Kelleher, the co-founder and chairman of Southwest Airlines. They describe their views on business and leadership, then wind up each spot by saying: “I am American business. I watch CNBC.”

The ads were made by CNBC’s internal marketing team, with no outside agency involved, and will run on CNBC. Network executives say they will probably run the ads on other NBC Universal networks starting this fall.

The LA Times’ Meg James writes about the challenge posed to CNBC by FBN…

It was Roger Ailes who came up with the slogan “First in Business News” for CNBC when he was running the channel. Now, he’s determined to knock it into second place.

Ailes is a key architect of News Corp.’s new Fox Business Network. The channel, which is scheduled to launch Oct. 15, helped drive media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s pursuit of Dow Jones & Co. News Corp. won its $5-billion bid for the company, which owns the Wall Street Journal, this week.

But executives at NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., say that CNBC is not about to cede any ground.

“We take all competition seriously,” Mark Hoffman, president of CNBC, said in an interview Wednesday. “We are going to work hard to make sure that we continue to do what we have done historically. We want to be fast and accurate with the information . . . and we are going to be unbiased.”

The New York Times’ Russ Beuttner writes about a longstanding relationship between Rudolph Giuliani and FNC head Roger Ailes…

So far this year, one political journal found, Mr. Giuliani has logged more time on Fox interview programs than any other candidate. Most of the time has been spent in interviews with Sean Hannity, an acknowledged admirer of the former mayor, according to the data compiled by the journal, known as The Hotline.

Fox executives say the items on Mr. Giuliani have been driven by his news value, by his status as a front-runner, not by his relationship with Mr. Ailes.

“I can’t remember his ever saying anything, one way or the other, about our coverage of the Giuliani campaign,” Brit Hume, the anchor who coordinates much of Fox’s political coverage, said of Mr. Ailes. “And I am under no injunctions, restrictions, encouragements or directions of any kind as to how that campaign should be covered.”

Yet the relationship between Mr. Ailes and Mr. Giuliani is the sort that led Mr. Ailes to grouse about CNN during the Clinton administration. Rick Kaplan, the president of CNN at the time, and President Clinton were established friends. Mr. Ailes, asserting the cable channel’s coverage of the president was altogether too warm, called it the “Clinton News Network.”

Mr. Ailes declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Mr. Giuliani, whose campaign would not answer specific questions about the relationship.