Thursday, May 05, 2005
MSNBC's Olbermann Rips Grace
Well it seems MSNBC's Keith Olbermann will not take getting beat in the ratings lying down. A TV Heads message board poster says Olbermann ripped Grace on last night's program:
Last night, Olbermann featured her as one of the "Top 3 Newsmakers Of The Day", a segment profiling three individuals or entities that have made news for rather notorious reasons. Specifically, he pointed to the criticism that she was "fast and loose".
The poster also raises the same question I have on why Olbermann would even be mentioning Grace:
But could one reason for including his competition in that segment be due to the ratings? On Tuesday night, Grace had 409,000 viewers while Olbermann only had 301,000. Furthermore, her 10pm EST. replay received 374,000 viewers compared to Scarborough Country which saw 247,000. While I concur that reporting the Grace story is relevant due to the legal ethics aspects of it and the fact that she is a public figure and commentator, there are several conflicts with Olbermann reporting this story on his show. First, an entire segment could have been allotted to discuss legal ethics both generally and specific to this case. His referrence was unfair because the facts were ignored and the segment was used only to make her look bad. And second, the comparative ratings both total and demographic reveal the underlying reason for this recent assail. Olbermann continues to get hammered by Grace and there are only sporadic incidents where the reverse occurs.
