This morning on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough quipped during his commentary on FBN’s remote at Englewood Cliffs “When you’re in cable news you don’t have to get a whole lot of people to be on top.”

Here’s a chart comparing Morning Joe since it “officially launched” on September 24th to Imus in the Morning during the same period last year…

Morning Joe has scratched 7% of the time since it officially launched and is down 18% in viewers from what Imus was averaging. The program is also down 43% in the 25-54 Demo. It’s averaging just 243,000 viewers and only 77,000 in 25-54.

A cable insider pointed out, “Joe would certainly know what it’s like not to have a ‘whole lot of people’ watching, much less anyone tuning into his show – test patterns rate higher.”

Making your lower thirds match your talent’s positions on camera…

No doubt you will notice today’s ratings do not include ratings for FBN. First of all, Nielsen does not rate any channel that has less than 40 million subscribers. FBN currently has somewhere north of 30 million. This is not an unusual scenario for channel debuts. However even if FBN had met the 40 million threshold, you still would not be getting ratings right away. No channel is rated at launch.

There is a three stage process to getting rated publicly by Nielsen.

Stage 1 - This is the Test Data stage. It’s a bare bones data distribution of market data and TV viewing habits. It only arrives to the network once a month and only covers certain parts and demographics of a network. Test Data does not offer more than minimal guidance to a network so that it can begin tracking its monthly performance as a research tool.

Stage 2 - This is the Access Subscription stage. It offers more data for the network to guage its performance and the performance of its competition. As with Stage 1 the data is for internal use only.

Stage 3 - This is the Fledgling Subscription stage. This stage is where the network and Nielsen are in agreement with the reliability of the data being generated. At this stage the ratings data is distributed both internally and externally. All the major nets, CNBC, CNN, FNC, HLN, and MSNBC are fledgling subscribers.
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson appeared on FBN in an interview with Dagen McDowell after his speech at the Georgetown Law Forum Paulson talked about the fact that the U.S has a strong global domestic economy but he thought the housing mess would have cleared up sooner than it has. McDowell asked him about the plan he put together and he strongly denied that there was a bail-out.

Cable News Daily Live Ratings for October 15, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 855,000 viewers
CNN – 446,000 viewers
MSNBC – 240,000 viewers
CNBC – 216,000 viewers
HLN – 216,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,490,000 viewers
CNN – 738,000 viewers
CNBC- 417,000 viewers
MSNBC –148,000 viewers
HLN – 398,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 228,000 viewers
CNN – 161,000 viewers
MSNBC – 78,000 viewers
CNBC – 79,000 viewers
HLN- 96,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 355,000 viewers
CNN – 262,000 viewers
MSNBC – 151,000 viewers
CNBC – 71,000 viewers
HLN – 164,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 877,000 viewers (299,000)
American Morning- 325,000 viewers (118,000)
Morning Joe – 188,000 viewers (a scratch with 34,000)
Robin & Co. – 230,000 viewers (112,000)
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CNN announced that it will air “CNN: Special Investigations Unit – The Noose: An American Nightmare” with Kyra Phillips on Tuesday, October 23, at 8 pm ET…

Since July, there have been more than a dozen reported incidents of nooses being displayed around the nation apparently intended to intimidate black people. CNN investigates whether the upsurge in these acts are associated with the events surrounding “The Jena 6” in Louisiana or part of a growing, more widespread racial intolerance. CNN’s Kyra Phillips, who recently reported the network’s in-depth investigation, Judgment in Jena, will anchor a special one-hour report, CNN: Special Investigations Unit – The Noose: An American Nightmare, on Tuesday, Oct. 23, at 8 p.m. (ET).

Nooses have been found in small towns like Winchester, Ky. and Elgin, Ill., as well as in cities like Philadelphia and New York, where a noose was hung on the door of a Columbia University professor’s office. The Coast Guard Academy, in New London, Conn., is also investigating two separate noose incidents.
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Sean Hannity will interview Rudy and Judith Giuliani on Hannity & Colmes tonight at 9pm ET. In an exclusive sit down interview the Giulianis will be discussing the 2008 race for the nomination and their campaign’s prospects.

The New York Times’ Jacques Steinberg scoops about Don Imus negotiating with RFD to simulcast his radio show…

For Mr. Imus, whose previous show on CBS Radio had been seen nationally on MSNBC, RFD (which stands for Rural Free Delivery) would offer something of a lower profile. Where once Mr. Imus had shared a cable network with hosts like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, his program would now serve as a marquee lead-in to shows with titles like “Cattlemen to Cattlemen’’ (a 30-minute news magazine about the cattle industry) and “Horse Babies’’ (an eight-week miniseries). Over Labor Day weekend, RFD broadcast a one-hour documentary about Mr. Imus’s ranch in New Mexico, where he regularly plays host to children with cancer and other illnesses.

If Mr. Imus were to sign with RFD TV, he would be seen in New York, Los Angeles and many other big cities (with the notable exception of Des Moines) only by viewers who had satellite service, including from Dish and DirecTV. But the person with knowledge of Mr. Imus’s conversations with RFD said the channel was hoping to use the presence of his show as a calling card that might earn it a place on Time Warner and other cable systems in New York City and other metropolitan areas.

The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin compares FNC’s Dick Cheney special to PBS’ Frontline Dick Cheney special…

While neither Cheney nor his enormously influential legal adviser David S. Addington were willing to talk to PBS, the vice president welcomed Fox News’s Baier with open arms.

As Baier explained at the opening of his report: “Fox News has been given unprecedented access into the vice president’s world. We spoke at length with him, to some of the people that have known him the longest, and to the president himself. We shadowed Cheney in Washington, visited his homes here and in Wyoming and traveled with him on a mission to the Mideast.”

And yet the most interesting part of the show was not what Cheney had to say, most of which we’d heard many times before. It was what the president said. I don’t think Bush has ever faced so many questions about Cheney before.

FBN’s D.C. Bureau Chief Bruce Becker does the FishbowlDC Interview thang…

TVNewser blogs about CNN’s America Votes 2008 upfront…

CBS News did a segment on FBN last night during the CBS Evening News…

Reuters TV interviews Neil Cavuto as part of a profile on FBN…

TV Squad’s Bob Sassone blogs about Anderson Cooper’s appearance today on Sesame Street (Note to Sassone: We’re still waiting for your list of great news anchors to go along with your list of three terrible anchors that you promised us way way back…)

I was obsessed with Sesame Street as a kid. And I liked Zoom too (I never really got into Electric Company). Is GNN something they’ve done before, or does Oscar The Grouch suddenly have a worldwide news network just for this one episode? Maybe Anderson will teach the kids to count up to 360.

Next week: Lou Dobbs teaches the kids about immigration on a very special Teletubbies.

Quo Vadimus has the video from today’s Morning Joe where Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist talk about the launch of FBN and the Englewood Cliffs remote.

Scarborough: Hey Erin, are you Fox hunting down there on Wall Street?

Burnett: Yeah I’m going to go Fox hunting today!

Scarborough: What dorks…good God

WHAC notes that CNN quietly released a new downloadable Desktop Breaking News Alert application…

Variety’s Michael Learmonth writes about yesterday’s CNN schedule news and interviews Lou Dobbs…

“Lou Dobbs Tonight” moves an hour later to 7 p.m. ET, a timeslot with 9% more potential viewers than his current 6 p.m. slot.

“Hopefully, it will mean a wider audience for the broadcast,” Dobbs told Daily Variety. “As an advocacy journalist, it’s my goal to get the message out to as many people as possible to continue to build our audience.”

Blitzer’s “Situation Room,” which aired from 4-6 p.m. and then for another hour at 7, will now air in a three-hour block from 4-7 p.m.

The New York Times’ Bill Carter follows up on his scoop yesterday regarding the cancelled CNBC ads by writing that FBN ads took the CNBC ads place on the Marketwatch and Wall Street Journal websites…

Dow Jones executives declined to comment on the reasons the contract was broken or why Fox was rewarded with the ad placements that CNBC had sought. Robert Christie, a spokesman for Dow Jones, said he would not go beyond comments made Sunday, in which he said the company reserved the right to alter the timing of advertising.

But one Dow Jones executive, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak for the company, said that the issues probably turned on the links between the Fox Business site and MarketWatch.

The executive said that those planned cross-links would have created a situation where an Internet user could have linked from Fox Business to MarketWatch and run directly into ads for CNBC. That is what the Dow Jones executives were trying to avoid, the executive said. He did not explain why Dow Jones had also canceled CNBC’s WSJ.com ads.

The decision to oust CNBC in favor of Fox Business brought up an issue that was often discussed during the News Corporation’s negotiations to purchase Dow Jones.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note Tim Arango’s article in this week’s Fortune magazine which features interviews with both Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes…

Ailes claims he was never opposed to the idea of a new business channel but just wanted to proceed slowly. “While Rupert always sees the glass as half full, I felt it was my job to present it as half empty until we were certain to get the maximum number of subscribers. I assumed since he wanted a business channel, we would eventually get there.”

At that March 2005 breakfast, Ailes fretted over whether the Internet could make television business news irrelevant. “The question is, Does a business news audience really exist? Have they gone to the Internet? Are you playing to the ladies in Indiana who are investing? Are you playing to Wall Street? Are you looking at capital markets?”
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CNN beat FNC in the Total Day Demo Saturday and the Primetime Demo on both Saturday and Sunday.

Cable News Ratings October 13, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 561,000 viewers
CNN – 460,000 viewers
MSNBC – 285,000 viewers
CNBC – 256,000 viewers
HLN – 262,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 619,000 viewers
CNN – 513,000 viewers
MSNBC – 278,000 viewers
CNBC – 294,000 viewers
HLN – 187,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 159,000 viewers
CNN – 187,000 viewers
MSNBC – 122,000 viewers
CNBC – 104,000 viewers
HLN – 110,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 162,000 viewers
CNN – 203,000 viewers
MSNBC – 133,000 viewers
CNBC – 127,000 viewers
HLN – 83,000 viewers

Cable News Ratings for October 14, 2007
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Liz Smith dishes about the upcoming FBN party in Manhattan…

The other hot ticket is for the Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes party in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they celebrate the launch of the Fox Business Network. It reminds me of the song “They All Laughed,” in which Ira Gershwin’s lyric says, “Now they’re fighting to get in!” The Oct. 24 party will boast a special performance by Counting Crows.

You can see Murdoch, Ailes and some of their star team on the new cover of Fortune magazine.

(Photo Credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Reuters’ Kenneth Li…

Analysts said FBN has yet to hit its stride.

“There are teething problems,” said independent network news analyst Andrew Tyndall, who added that he found it “hard to watch.” He said he found the tone of some of the reports disturbing: “They appear to have a rooting interest in prices going up. It’s normally not a good sign of journalism when you’re rooting for an outcome.”

Fox Business executives have said they found existing business news coverage to be unfairly negative.

FBN also has said it will seek to demystify Wall Street, helping regular viewers connect global business trends to ordinary people’s lives. “Capitalism cures cancer? Death rates down”, one caption read on Monday.

The New York Daily News’ David Hinckley…
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The New York Times’ Allessandra Stanley…

It was hard to muster a lot of fun explaining the $100 billion superfund that the country’s three largest banks have said they will create to shore up the market for mortgage securities.

Eric Bolling, a former financial news commentator who left CNBC for FBN, took quickly to the buoyant spirit of his new home. The superfund could have “a positive impact,” he assured Peter Barnes, a morning anchor. Mr. Bolling uttered the word “bail,” then corrected himself, saying that the superfund could “put a calming tone on the market” and have a “real upside.” When he said that the technical process was “complicated,” Mr. Barnes reminded him warningly, “no jargon.”

FBN makes a point of avoiding technical terms and Wall Street argot. The anchors on CNBC’s morning show “Squawk Box” sit across from each other in their shirt-sleeves to mimic the look of a trading desk, and anchors speak against an electronic backdrop of charts and stock prices.

The hosts of the FBN morning show sat aligned on a curved banquette. A conversation about business blogs on the Internet was set around a wooden tea table, with bookshelves of magazines and newspapers in the background.

The Financial Times’ Josh Chaffin…
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