Inquiring minds want to know:
How high were CNN’s local ratings for its Town Hall with Donald Trump?
How have local ratings been for Fox News at 8 p.m. weekdays since Tucker Carlson was fired and the company paid a $787 million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems?
And how low have CNN’s ratings been lately here since CEO Chris Licht has turned the cable news network to the center and rightward?
First things first:
Overall, the relatively low nightly local cable news numbers illustrated more people discuss the shows than the small viewership may deserve.
The Trump Town Hall in which anchor Kaitlin Collins tried to fact check the lies by the former president had a 2.0 local rating on CNN here from 8 to 9:15 p.m.
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CNN’s panel discussion after the Town Hall ended led by Anderson Cooper had a 1.7 up until 10 p.m. and the final hour mostly blasting Trump’s performance had a 1.1 rating. The overall rating for the night on CNN was 1.7.
A 2.0 rating represents 12,750 households in Western New York. Trump’s TV drawing power clearly has declined but that is still a very good prime-time rating here for CNN.
However, the day after the Trump Town Hall and the resulting backlash over giving him a forum to spout lies, CNN’s rating at 8 and 9 p.m. fell back to a 0.5 and its 10 p.m. rating slipped to a 0.2.
Before the Town Hall, CNN received prime-time ratings of 0.5 or lower on most nights. The night before the Town Hall it averaged a 0.8 rating at 9 p.m., which was high by its standards.
As has happened nationally since Carlson was fired on April 24, Fox News ratings here have taken a significant hit.
Ratings for Carlson’s 8 p.m. program generally were in the high 1s and the low 2s here. His show averaged a 2 rating in its last week, with a 1.7 rating for his final program on April 21. The first 8 p.m. program after his departure had the same 1.7 rating, but the ratings slipped after that and fell below a 1.0 for four nights. The 8 p.m. hour recovered last week to a range of 1.4 to 1.6, still below Carlson’s ratings.
Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. ratings on Fox News also have declined here, but not by as much and his show now has a higher rating on most nights here than the hosts replacing Carlson at 8 p.m.
Laura Ingraham’s 10 p.m. Fox News program, which has been the weakest rated here, has seen her ratings dip below a 1 on several nights.
Since May 1, Newsmax, the right-wing competitor to Fox News, has been receiving ratings here ranging from 0.0 to 0.7 at 8 p.m., 0.0 to 0.5 at 9 p.m. and 0.0 to 0.3 at 10 p.m. Its ratings on two nights, May 1 and May 8, were slightly higher than the ratings here for CNN.
Until May 10, the liberal MSNBC lineup of programs hosted by Chris Hayes, Alex Wagner and Lawrence O’Donnell had higher ratings here than Fox News hosts on many nights.
WIVB-TV (Channel 4) news director Brianne Betts, who has been on medical leave, has resigned, General Manager Joe Abouzeid confirmed. She had been here about nine months. Josh Roy has been named acting news director.
Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen last Sunday’s episode of the HBO drama “Succession,” you probably should stop reading.
The tense episode, which featured former WKBW-TV (Channel 7) anchor Ashley Rowe as a news co-anchor for the right-wing cable news channel ATN, had some similarities to the 2020 presidential election when Fox News infuriated Trump and his supporters by declaring early that the key state of Arizona was going to Joe Biden.
In the fictional “Succession” take, brothers Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) essentially had a choice. They could decide whether to make a deal to save the dangerous far-right nominee, Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk), that their late father Logan (Brian Cox) supported by declaring Mencken had won the key state of Wisconsin. Or they could delay that call because a fire destroyed 100,000 absentee ballots in Milwaukee and prevented votes in the city from being counted and going to the Democratic opponent to the degree he would win the state.
Roman was all for the deal no matter the cost to America. Kendall, thinking of his children’s future, was waffling as usual.
He ultimately had to decide whether to save the nominee who might destroy America after learning that his sister Shiv (Sarah Snook) had gone behind their backs to support the tech genius, Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard), trying to buy a large part of their company in a deal the brothers wanted to squash.
Save democracy or save the guy who might destroy America because he agreed to destroy a deal the brothers didn’t want?
If you watched the cynicism of “Succession” over the years, you knew that ultimately would be a no-brainer for the Roy brothers.
Of course, the episode gave the fictional ATN even more power to decide the presidency than Fox News had in 2020. But still it was a frightening example of what could happen under the most unusual of circumstances while at the same time pitting the brothers against their duplicitous sister.
All in all, it was the best “Succession” episode since the one in which Logan Roy died.
Since last week’s column speculating about what network shows would be canceled, some answers have surfaced.
ABC has canceled the newspaper series “Alaska Daily,” “Big Sky” and “The Company You Keep.” Western New York actor William Fichtner had a supporting role in “Company.” The network also picked up “911,” the series that Fox canceled.
Fox also canceled the popular medical series “The Resident” and the comedy “Call Me Kat.” By the way, “The Resident” was created by Amy Holden Jones, a graduate of Buffalo Seminary. The much-publicized Fox series “Monarch” was canceled some time ago.
NBC’s fall schedule has one Buffalo angle.
Jesse L. Martin, the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts graduate who had a long-running co-starring role on “Law & Order” and has been in several other series, stars as the lead character of the upcoming NBC series, “The Irrational.”
Here’s the summary of the series supplied by NBC: “Based on the best-selling author Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational,” Alec Mercer is a world-renowned leader in behavioral science who lends his expertise to an array of high-stakes cases involving governments, law enforcement and corporations with his unique and unexpected approach to understanding human behavior.”
Martin plays Mercer. Due to the writers strike, it isn’t yet known whether the series will air in the fall or midseason.
