Paul Farhi
‘This is preposterous,’ says the media about the media’s convention overkill
[Commentary] The balloons have already been stuffed into the rafters. The nominee is already known. The story lines are few. Yet 15,000 journalists — six for every one of the 2,500 delegates here — have encamped for the Republican National Convention.
Despite the news media’s exhaustively chronicled (by the news media) financial problems, there seems to be no slowdown in the intensity and investment by media companies in covering Donald Trump’s now-inevitable coronation as the party’s standard-bearer. The central media corridor, a kind of wonk Woodstock (with better food), is an arcade along East Fourth Street, adjacent to Quicken Loans Arena. The question is: Why are so many gathered for what is largely a scripted and preordained event? Barring unforeseen developments — and political conventions are engineered to avert unforeseen developments — the political conventions may be the least efficient news events that the media covers.
As ‘Meet the Press’ struggles in the ratings, plenty of questions for host David Gregory
If “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory were a guest on his own show, he knows the kinds of questions he’d be asked.
Why have your ratings been falling? Is the show in trouble? Is your job in trouble?
During the first three months of 2014, the NBC program finished behind perennial rivals “Face the Nation” on CBS and “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, despite being helped by two weeks of Winter Olympics hoopla. In the final quarter of 2013, viewing among people ages 25 to 54, the preferred group for TV news advertisers, fell to its lowest level ever.
The good news for all these news shows is that they remain among the most durable on TV, if perhaps less influential than they once were. Even as everything else on TV has lost viewers over time, the Big Three have held steady and even gained viewers. Collectively, about 9.6 million people watched them each week during the first three months of 2014, about the same number that watched Russert in 2005. This doesn’t count the audience for innumerable Sunday-morning competitors, from Fox News Sunday (hosted by former “Meet the Press” moderator Chris Wallace) to “Al Punto” on Univision. The shows can occasionally make news, too, if the interview subject is big enough.