Sunday, September 28, 2014

Sunday Morning Comin' Down




This week, Meet the Press host Shuck Todd decided to kick it old school -- 
NBC insiders are “relieved” to not have to suffer through another week of dull ratings for “Meet the Press” under new host Chuck Todd, sources sniped to Page Six.

In the wake of the program’s third-place finish in the ratings last week, this Sunday’s broadcast will be pre-empted for the Ryder Cup golf tournament.

Political guru Todd scored a quick win in his Sept. 7 debut on “MTP” with an exclusive interview with President Obama, drawing nearly 3 million viewers. But he’s since slipped to third place, grabbing only 2.4 million viewers for the Sept. 21 program. ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” scored 3 million viewers on the Sept. 21 show, while CBS’s “Face the Nation” earned 2. 9 million viewers.

One media insider told us of NBC execs: “They are quite relieved there is no broadcast given their showings in the ratings. They lost by a huge margin and have poured so much money into promotion and press that it’s a surprise they’re not doing a little better and weren’t able to hold any of the audience that tuned in for Todd’s premiere week.”
-- and deploy what I identified back in May as former host David Gregory's career endgame strategy of improving MTP's ratings by not airig MTP:
...
Several weeks ago when this started, I riffed mockingly that this was NBC test-driving a burn-the-village-to-save-the-village strategy to relieve David Gregory of the responsibility of pretending to be a journalist long enough to let the searing actuality of Greggers' week-in-week-out banal, Beltway incompetence fade and be replaced by the same kind of nostalgia for a fake past that drives people to pine for the Good Old Days of St. Ronny Reagan.
The Meet the Press ratings death-spiral was briefly arrested due to preemption by a soccer game, which meant that the John McCain/Lindsay Graham Human Neocon Centipede was able to sleep in today, and Chuck Todd had to read his 2016 goat entrails alone in his kitchenette with no one listening.  I think this bold "Saving Meet the Press by not actually airing Meet the Press" idea has a lot of promise.
But now that they have done it yet again, I cannot help but wonder what special senior executive money-lined face-saving coffin they have prepared for Mr. Gregory and what fresh hell the geniuses at NB-See/NB-Do have waiting in the wings to drive down my estimation of American journalism even further.
So if you wanted a big, ol' toke of Todd this Sunday, you had to shimmy into your HazMat suit and slide on over to the Breitbart Columbarium of the Journalistic Undead where Shuck was busy doing a little retail sucking up to the shallow end of the American gene pool.

Sample Question (with emphasis added):
...But what Reagan inherited was just as bad as what Obama inherited. The Reagan policies created a million jobs in one month. Now we're six years into Obama's policies. At what point, for the good of the country, do we admit Obama's policies have failed?
Correct  Answer:
Let me explain why that is quite possibly the stupidest damn thing I have heard since the last time Sarah Palin opened her pie hole.  I will go slow and use little wordsies.
Shuck Todd Answer:
It's always been: "This is going to be the year the economy accelerates," and every time you think the economy is stepping on the gas, something trips it up. I think we're going to know in six to nine months. That's when a judgment will start to be made.
 Jesus, man, where's your fucking pride?

If I had to guess, I'd guess that within three months, NBC will revive the now-nearly-forgotten "wheel show" concept



and put Todd, Joe Scarborough, Luke Russert and a Random Wingnut Guest Host on a one-week-on/three-week-off rotation.

Thus creating a train wreck which will be visible from orbit.

And proving definitively that the only topical public interest teevee being aired on Sunday anymore is a half hour comedy on HBO (h/t Heather at Crooks and Liars)




6 comments:

dinthebeast said...

i think the cheese has slid off of Chuckie's cracker myself.
Maybe to help their ratings they could re-air the monitor tape from Reagan's colonoscopy. That's right, I said RE-air. It ran in '85, on the same weekend as the Live-Aid concert.
Now, of course,the polyps are making the programming decisions and might be too shy to run it.

-Doug in Oakland

bowtiejack said...

Thank you DG (and Heather and John Oliver) for making my Monday morning. Thank you.

Many years ago, when I was still a very young man, I kept hearing about this Ayn Rand woman and her great book The Fountainhead. So I got a copy and started reading. And I still remember my impression then, "I don't get it. This is tiresome, boring and stupid. The writing is better and more interesting in Superman comics (a similarly themed literary oeuvre which were still around then)."

[Oh, I left out "cartoonish" which was what probably inspired the Superman comparison.]

The real difference between wading thru the interminable prose of The Fountainhead and the high school assignment of Tale of Two Cities was that, at least, there was a Classic Comic for the latter. Never could finish either of them.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

Whoah. I don't think ANYONE predicted that MTP would be deploying the Pre-emption Distraction Ploy after THREE WEEKS.... who bet the under?

Robt said...

Here is a Sunday MTP lead-off subject economic question;

How is President Obama responsible for Governor Brownbacks state economic turmoil?

OR,
Red states refusal to accept the A.C.A. medicaid expansion and did everything possible, even using tax dollars to obstruct and condemn the ACA at every end.
Did not the President foresee this?
IF the President would have addressed this wouldn't red states have then accepted the Medicaid expansion.
Would it really have assisted in state revenues by an influx of money to the medical industries in these states, employing medical professionals (lowering unemployment), and why would a governor not care to enable the people of his state to get healthy-put them back to work and increase productivity by having healthy working people?
Todd, could ask why Obama was a failure at seeing the future obstructionism.
He can call in Heritage Foundation's Jim DeMint to provide unbiased commentary to support using the term, "failed presidential fortune teller".

Is MTP compering with FOX for the old conservative white guys watching from the nursing homes?

Redhand said...

They lost by a huge margin and have poured so much money into promotion and press that it’s a surprise they’re not doing a little better and weren’t able to hold any of the audience that tuned in for Todd’s premiere week.”

It's a surprise? Really? To whom? How could they possibly have failed to see that (1) Chuck Todd is cut from the same "both-sider" mold as Gregory; and (2) in any event MTP's death spiral is caused by the message itself, not the messenger?

I guess one has to be on the outside looking in to see the obvious rot at NBC.

Anonymous said...

It was great to hear Rude Pundit give you some credit this morning on the Stephanie Miller show this morning. Go Driftglass !