Nielsen has released ratings for last night’s election coverage, and the company reports that from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 Eastern Time last night, the average audience was 78.5 million viewers.
By comparison, 59.2 million watched during this period in 2004, and 61.6 million did so in 2000.
The average ratings for the period between 8:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., which included John McCain's concession and Barack Obama's victory speeches, were similar.
“Under the guise of a 'profile' piece, the New York Times fails to cover any new ground or provide any discernible value to the reader other than to portray Mrs. McCain in the worst possible light,” McCain-Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb said in a statement released Saturday morning. “Though Mrs. McCain’s battle with drug addiction and even her miscarriages are again reported, the paper entirely ignores a life devoted to family and charity work in the most impoverished and violent corners of the world -- except when a detail can be quibbled with so as to imply some kind of deceit. This campaign made every effort to share personal accounts of Mrs. McCain’s good works with the paper, but apparently they were deemed unfit for publication in the New York Times. This is gutter journalism at its worst -- an unprecedented attack on a presidential candidate's spouse.”
Here’s a taste of the Times story:
Mrs. McCain, 54, describes herself as her husband’s best friend, though for the last two decades they have mostly lived apart, she in Arizona, he in Washington. She seemed like an ideal political partner initially, giving Mr. McCain a home state, money and contacts that jump-started his career. But as the years passed, Mrs. McCain also became a liability at times. She played a role in the Keating Five savings-and-loan scandal, and just as her husband was rehabilitating his reputation, she was caught stealing drugs from her nonprofit organization to feed her addiction to painkillers. She has a vast fortune that sets the McCains apart from most other Americans, a problem in a presidential race that hinges on economic anxieties. She can be imprecise: she has repeatedly called herself an only child, for instance, even though she has two half-siblings, and has provided varying details about a 1994 mercy mission to Rwanda.
Along with its statement, the McCain campaign also released what it says is a Facebook message by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor to a 16 year-old schoolmate of John and Cindy McCain's daughter Bridget, “trolling for information on Mrs. McCain,” as well as a letter from Johd Dowd, Cindy McCain’s attorney, to Times Managing Editor Bill Keller. Both are below.
(DENVER) I caught up With CBS News senior political correspondent Jeff Greenfield at the DNC site in Denver. Jeff shared his insights on how covering the conventions has changed over the years, whether there is discontentment among Hillary Clinton’s delegates and who he thinks John McCain will pick to be his running mate, among other topics.
(DENVER) I caught up with CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer inside one of the CBS News trailers at the Democratic National Convention site. This is the 20th convention from which Bob has reported during his career in broadcasting, but he says he’s still not sick of them.
Schieffer On Covering The Conventions:
“I just love them. They’re not what they used to be — they used to be a lot more spontaneous than they are now. Now they’re more like infomercials or an auto show where the manufacturer roles out the new model and the press comes, kicks the tires, and writes a story about the new model.”
“This is one of the few times in American life when people actually gather around the television set and listen to a political speech.”
“Every one of them is different and they’re all fun. In 1972, which was my second convention, George McGovern didn’t make his acceptance speech until 3 in the morning, which is primetime in Guam. That was the most tumultuous except for the ‘68 convention, of course, when there was rioting in the streets.”
Schieffer will host the final 2008 presidential debate on Oct. 15 at Hofstra University in New York.
“People always ask me, ‘Do you get nervous on television?’ And the true answer is that I don’t. I mean, I’ve done it so long that I don’t. Being on television is sort of like being a professional athlete. First you learn how to play the game, then you learn how to play in front of other people, and after that you’re just kind of zoned in — you don’t know that people are there. But for the first time in 25 years, when I was standing backstage at that [2004] debate, I really had butterflies.”
“After the debate, I asked Kerry at one point — I saw him some place months after the election — and I said, ‘Were you nervous? I was really nervous.’ And he gave me this long answer. I came away from it not knowing whether he was nervous or not. It just happened that a couple of weeks later I was at something where the president was and I said, ‘Mr. President, I’m just curious, I was nervous. Were you nervous?’ He said, ‘Hell, yes! How do you think I would feel?’ And I always thought that maybe, whether you agreed with him or not, maybe that was why George Bush got elected. At least you understood what he was saying.”
(DENVER) At 12:46 a.m. EDT last night, CBS News director of political coverage Steve Chaggaris hit “send” on his blackberry. He had typed out the subject line minutes before: “CBS News can confirm Biden will be Obama’s running mate.”
While most of the country was asleep at that moment, the CBS News Broadcast Center in New York City came alive. Kevin Hechtkopf, a CBSNews.com producer, sent out an email alert to subscribers, CBS radio broke into their regular coverage, and television correspondent Priya David took her seat in the anchor’s chair to interrupt Craig Ferguson’s show to let the network’s viewers in on the big political news.
All of this happened within ten minutes.
“Rightly or wrongly, it’s one of the few things in the campaign that people have no idea what’s going to happen, but it generates such a huge amount of interest,” Chaggaris, who broke the news for CBS News, said. “At the same time, we really wonder, is it going to be a game changer? People think it’s going to be a game changer every time but it usually turns out it isn’t.”
Chaggaris’ email was the culmination at CBS News of weeks of prodding phone calls, overanalyzing of Obama’s schedule and attempts (some of them, admittedly, ridiculous) to decipher any “hints” that might indicate when he would make his VP selection.
Media Matters Action Network has released a new ad in which presumptive GOP nominee John McCain is portrayed as the favorite candidate of the media. Though McCain has jokingly referred to the media as his "base" in the past, most chatter concerning media favoritism recently has focused on Barack Obama.
The spot shows McCain picking flowers off a sunflower and repeating the words "they love me" as various members of the media are shown speaking positively about the Arizona senator.
"Fed up?" asks an announcer at the end. "Take the pledge to hold the media accountable." (The Media Matters Action Network Web site features a book pushing this same critique called "Free Ride: John McCain And The Media." CBS News chief political consultant Marc Ambinder reports that Media Matters is spending about $100,000 to air the spot.
Media Matters' conservative counterpart, Media Research Center, meanwhile, writes today that the networks disproportionately covered Obama's trip to Europe. "The Big Three broadcast networks lavished an incredible amount of attention on Barack Obama's tour of the Middle East and Europe last week," they write. "Compared to a very similar trip by John McCain last March, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts gave Obama more than ten times the coverage — 92 minutes for the Democrat's eight-day trip, compared to just eight and a half minutes for the Republican's seven-day tour."
Here's the Media Matters spot:
The AFL-CIO, meanwhile, which supports Obama, is sending a mailer to union households in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania trying to knock down rumors about the presumptive Democratic nominee. You can check the mailer out over at National Journal (PDF); it assures voters that Obama wears a flag pin on his lapel, is a Christian, was sworn in on the Bible, was born in America, and places his hand over his heart when he says the Pledge of Allegiance.
Influential conservative commentator and longtime Washington journalist Robert Novak has been hospitalized after being diagnosed with a brain tumor.
“On Sunday, July 27, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor," Novak wrote in a statement given to his publisher. "I have been admitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where doctors will soon begin appropriate treatment.
“I will be suspending my journalistic work for an indefinite but, God willing, not too lengthy period.”
A fixture of the Washington media for five decades, Novak played a prominent role in the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal when he identified Plame as a CIA operative in his newspaper column. Last week, Novak was in the news when he was cited for hitting a pedestrian with his car in Washington.
John McCain used to joke that the media was his political base, but now his campaign is using humor to suggest that the same crowd that was once wowed by the witty senator's "straight talk" is now in the tank for his opponent.
A new web ad called "Obama Love" strings together a series of clips featuring prominent TV journalists, including some that delve into the personal impact the Obama phenomenon has had on them. The ad takes particular aim at MSNBC's Chris Matthews, highlighting his description of a "thrill going up my leg" as he listened to an Obama speech.
Suggestions that Obama has been getting preferentially treatment from the media are not new, but the accusation has intensified during the Illinois senator's foreign trip, which is drawing enormous media attention, including one-on-one interviews with all three network news anchors.
The McCain campaign is advertising a contest on its web site that allows users to "pick the best song" to capture the media's alleged love affair with Obama.
After The Drudge Report broke the news that The New York Times had rejected an opinion piece submitted by John McCain on his views on the military situation in Iraq, the newspaper issued the following statement:
"It is standard procedure on our Op-Ed page, and that of other newspapers, to go back and forth with an author on his or her submission. We look forward to publishing Senator McCain's views in our paper just as we have in the past. We have published at least seven Op-Ed pieces by Senator McCain since 1996. The New York Times endorsed Senator McCain as the Republican candidate in the presidential primaries. We take his views very seriously."
The New York Times' rejection of the McCain piece on Friday came less than a week after it published an op-ed on Iraq penned by presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
McCain's submission to the Times touted the success of the troop surge and also heavily criticizes Obama, according to The Drudge Report.
"Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his 'plan for Iraq.,'" McCain wrote. "Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say."
On Friday we mentioned a pair of op-eds, including one from former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, suggesting that sexism has been directed towards Hillary Clinton during her presidential run.
Now Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean has taken up the argument, twice this weekend alleging sexism in coverage of the New York senator. Here's Dean – never, it's worth pointing out, much of a fan of the fourth estate – at Saturday's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting:
Over the course of the primary there have been some tough disagreements and some ugly moments in this campaign. On the blogosphere, and the airwaves. Emotions have run high and heated discussions have led at times to blatantly racist comments and, blatantly sexist comments particularly by some members of the media. We know that those comments have no place in our society and certainly no place in our party.
There has been an enormous amount of sexism in this campaign on the part of the media, including the mainstream media...there have been major networks that have featured numerous outrageous comments that if the words were reversed and they were about race, the people would have been fired....What you don't get over is deep wounds that have been inflicted on somebody because they happen to be a woman running for president of the United States.
