Archives: November 2007

It looks like Monkey-gate may be over. Earlier this week, Erin Burnett raised some eyebrows as she flippantly referred to President Bush as a “monkey” during Monday’s broadcast of Morning Joe. The video on YouTube has over 60,000 views.

Today, on Hardball, she apologized to President Bush. “Earlier this week I was on MSNBC, on Morning Joe, and I made a bad attempt at humor…I said something stupid, I just want to make sure I apologize if I offended anyone. I do have the upmost respect for the President, I hope he has a great weekend, and Chris, I hope you do too,” Burnett said.

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Early this afternoon a woman inside Hillary Clinton‘s campaign headquarters in Rochester, New Hampshire called CNN’s Washington, DC bureau. CNN emailed TVNewser with the details of a behind-the-scenes story that unfolded over the next several hours.

The woman, described as being “very upset” spoke with a CNN staffer, and then put the hostage-taker Leeland Eisenberg on the phone.

Eisenberg told the CNN employee that he had mental problems and couldn’t get anyone to help him. He eventually hung up the telephone. At that point, CNN notified law enforcement about the call.

Throughout the afternoon, the hostage and Eisenberg called back to CNN several times, talking with additional CNN staffers. All the while, CNN was consulting with its own security, and chose not to report any of this on the air. The concern was that the campaign office might have a TV tuned to CNN, which could have compromised the safety of the hostages.

It wasn’t until the situation was over, during the 6pmET hour of The Situation Room, that Wolf Blitzer described what had been going on inside CNN while the drama unfolded in New Hampshire.

A 2008 campaign reporting assignment in New Hampshire for Anderson Cooper turned into coverage of a breaking news story related to the Democratic Presidential front runner.

The bomb scare and hostage situation, which was peacefully resolved, prompted CNN to forgo re-airing Campbell Brown‘s documentary, “Campaign Killers: Why Do Negative Ads Work?” for an earlier edition of AC360.

The special airs at 8pmET tonight.

25-54 demographic: (L +SD)

Total day: FNC: 264 | CNN: 159 | MSNBC: 123 | HLN: 106

Prime: FNC: 403 | CNN: 166 | MSNBC: 168 | HLN: 210

	5p:	6p:	7p:	8p:	9p:	10p:	11p:
FNC	BigStory:	Hume:	Shep:	O’Reilly:	H&C:	Greta:	O’Reilly:
	263	377	344	539	371	298	412
CNN	Blitzer:	Blitzer:	Dobbs:	OutOpen:	King:	Cooper:	Cooper:
	162	241	220	179	167	151	163
MSNBC	Hardball:	Tucker:	Hardball:	Countdo.:	Abrams:	Special:	Reports:
	105	111	166	273	151	80	117
HLN	Prime:	Prime:	Beck:	Grace:	Beck:	Grace:	Showbiz:
	52	58	159	197	195	237	172

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According to fast affiliate data from Nielsen, Good Morning America beat the Today show by 529,000 total viewers on Wednesday. That was the morning after the finale of Dancing with the Stars. GMA had on the winning couple as well as other dancing partners from the show.

The complete morning show ratings picture for the week will be out next Thursday.

During the Holiday-shortened week (Thursday & Friday are omitted from the average) The Today show brought in more than 5.6 million viewers for the week — a 14% lead over GMA and a 112% lead over The Early Show.

For the week of Nov. 19:

Total viewers: NBC: 5,620,000 / ABC: 4,910,000 / CBS: 2,650,000

Households: NBC: 4.4/15 / ABC: 3.8/13 / CBS: 2.1/7

25-54 demo: NBC: 2.2/15 / ABC: 1.7/13 / CBS: 0.9/8

The most-watched Presidential primary debate of all time continues to garner varied reactions from media writers.

Obviously, the big story remains Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr (Ret.), but different writers tackled different sides of the debate.

David Hinckley in the New York Daily News focused on the “fresh element” of having YouTube involved.

Steve Huntley in the Chicago Sun-Times called the debate a “loud and rowdy affair,” and wondered how the first debate participants JFK and Nixon would think of the debating format of today.

And in the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz begins his article proclaiming, “So much for the YouTubers. It was the journalist who got last night’s debate off to a rollicking start…” He praised Anderson Cooper for starting off the war of words between Romney and Guiliani, and later for bringing up the Politico story about Guiliani’s questionable finances.

…as Shepard Smith might call it. But Shep’s off today, Gregg Jarrett was manning Studio B. The tense situation at Hillary Clinton‘s Rochester, NH campaign headquarters is just one breaking story the networks are following today. In addition to Carl Cameron on the scene for FNC, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who happened to be in New Hampshire covering the camapaigns, reported by phone from Rochester.

And as that story was breaking just before 1pmET, news crews in Chicago were already covering a train wreck involving a Amtrak passenger train on the city’s south side.

Then at 3:36pmET MSNBC’s Chris Jansing broke the news that the Kalpoe brothers (of the Natalie Holloway case) have been released from custody in Aruba. MSNBC crime analyst Clint Van Zandt was doing double duty on the Holloway and hostage stories.

The cable news networks are following breaking news of a bomb scare and hostage situation at the Hillary Clinton campaign office in Rochester, New Hampshire. Boston affiliates have dispatched choppers over the scene while Fox News’s Carl Cameron is reporting live from the passenger seat of one of FNC’s new campaign coverage vehicles.

Cameron and his crew are on the way to Rochester, NH to cover the story. And perhaps remembering he was on TV and therefore setting an example for viewers, Cameron buckled his seat belt mid-report, prompting anchor Megyn Kelly to remark, “buckle up buddy.”

>Update: 2:49pmET — Cameron and his crew arrived at the scene of the hostage situation.

>More: HuffPo‘s got thoughts on campaign Carl Cameron…

According to Huffington Post‘s Rachel Sklar, the now-cancelled CBS Democratic Presidential candidates’ debate — to have been moderated by Katie Couric — is an “unfortunate” hiccup in an otherwise stable period in Couric’s tenure so far at CBS:

“(The debate) would have been a moment,” Sklar writes, “to remind the critics that she, too, has what it takes to make it on that stage and, by extension, on that screen…It’s not fair — why should she have anything more to prove than Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann or Anderson Cooper or Brit Hume? — but it just is and she just does.

“As far as measurable benchmarks go, this would have been one.”