David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. A Tale of Two Newscasters
It was the best of times for Keith Olbermann; it was the worst of times for Katie Couric.
Despite potentially putting herself in harm’s way in Iraq, Katie Couric earned the worst ratings of her year-and-a-week tenure as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.” Just under 5.5 million on average watched her newscast last week. CBS News blamed the slump on, naturally, golf. (The U.S. Open cut into viewership on Friday.)
Meanwhile, for the first time in his career, Keith Olbermann smacked down his arch-nemesis Bill O’Reilly (since when do newscasters have arch-nemeses?), beating Billo on Friday in the advertiser-friendly viewers-aged-25-54 demographic. The Screaming Loufah still had scads more viewers than Olbermann, but they tended to be Bitter Old White Men Who Won’t Part With Their Money and therefore not particularly valuable to advertisers. Olbermann’s “Countdown” was, in fact, the highest rated newscast in all of prime-time cable on Friday, a first for once-lowly MSNBC.
Couric, of course, still boasts far larger audiences than O’Reilly and Olbermann combined, but then, she is being paid $15 million per year, or a little less than $3 per viewer on a nightly basis. O’Reilly earns an estimated $9 million per annum, thanks to his TV and radio shows, books and speaking fees. By comparison, Olbermann got a raise to $4 million this year, for his work on “Countdown,” co-hosting NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” pre-game and halftime shows and occasional other contributions to NBC News. Not bad for a newscaster whose show occasionally recreates the news with cardboard puppets on popsicle sticks.