Smitten to C'est la vie
Los Angeles has done its part to offer some post-election therapy for the political junkies among us and those suffering from PEWS. The Pat Brown Institute had their full-day program last week and the USC Unruh Institute of Politics has their 2-day conference today and tomorrow (Joel Fox, Joe Mathews and Tom Elias are seated in front of me as I write this while Jim VanderHei of POLITICO moderates a panel of eight). Nevertheless, the hoi polloi have gone from smitten to c'est la vie.
Paul Farhi
Staff Writer - Washington Post
Friday, November 21, 2008; C01
Americans became smitten with the high drama of the presidential election, but the transition of power is proving less than sexy.
Ratings for cable TV news and the number of visits to news Web sites built for weeks and then peaked on Election Day, giving the electronic media some of their biggest audiences in years. But since then, TV ratings and online traffic have fallen -- in many cases precipitously -- indicating that viewers and visitors have largely quenched their thirst for political news.
The ratings rise and fall suggest that the suspense and conflict of the campaign's closing days made for a far better story than the aftermath of President-elect Barack Obama's victory and the beginnings of his administration. The lone exception was broadcast news, which has held relatively steady through November.
The most pronounced declines were in traffic at popular news Web sites, which saw a steady increase for months. The tide crested as Americans went to the polls; MSNBC.com, which has been the most popular news site for several months, had 25.1 million unique visitors during the week of the election (it also reported 471 million page views on Election Day -- a record for the site).
Since then, millions of visitors have gone elsewhere, according to Nielsen Online. MSNBC.com's traffic declined by 25 percent, or by 6.4 million unique visitors, from its election week peak. Yahoo News lost 5.2 million unique visitors (21 percent). CNN.com, which scored the most traffic during the week of the election, deflated most of all, losing one-third of its 26.9 million visitors in the post-election week.
The story was similar for the cable news networks, which for months devoted huge swaths of their airtime to politics. Viewing of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC peaked during the week of the election. Fox News, in fact, became the most popular cable network of any kind in prime time for two weeks running, beating not just its cable news rivals but also the cable entertainment networks USA and TNT.
Read more. (emphasis added)
Labels: 2008 Election Conference, Barack Obama, john mccain, Paul Farhi, PEWS, washington post
Posted by Edward Headington @ 11/21/2008 12:18:00 PM
3 Comments:
Could someone please channel their secret decoder ring and tell me what in hell this presser is about? I think I spy five potential topics in the first paragraph.
It's bad enough that the former news site MayorSam has since th beginning of 2008 chosen to publish straight promo material and press releases. But now we're seeing the consequence of doing so: now the publicists are slapping things down as fast as they can and aren't even trying to make sense anymore.
Please, Ed, take a big breath and learn how to contain an actual coherent thought within a paragraph.
Here's the first Gallup poll as to who Republicans favor as their presidential candidate in 2012.
Briefly:
Palin leads with 67%, but the poll was taken before her alarmingly stupid turkey news conference. Go to YouTube and type "Palin turkey".
She's followed by:
Romney 62%
Huckabee 61%
Conservative Republicans:
Palin 73%
Romney 64%
Huckabee 65%
Moderate/Liberal GOP:
Romney 59%
Giuliani 50%
Palin 48%
Huckabee 46%
http://www.gallup.com/poll/112252/GOP-Faithful-Like-Palin-Romney-Huckabee-2012.aspx?version=print
It took me a while to figure out what this post was about.
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