Democrats Headed for New Low in Convention Viewers!! (Liberals Hate
America!!!)




http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=5806116

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - With roughly 10 percent fewer Americans
watching than four years ago, the Democratic convention may be headed
for an all-time low in TV viewership for a national party meeting,
according to ratings issued on Wednesday.

Network executives say the low ratings prove that public interest in
the event has waned as national conventions have lost their drama and
evolved into carefully scripted political infomercials.

But critics say the major networks themselves have contributed to the
decline in public interest through their decision to limit coverage of
the Democratic and Republican conventions to just an hour a night for
three nights of the four-day events.

The critics say that adding insult to injury, network journalists are
conveying a message that viewers are missing out on little.

"You have to take a speed-yawning course to get through some of this
stuff," CBS News anchor Dan Rather told the Dallas Morning News. "If
we were on for three hours a night, in a lot of places a test pattern
would get better ratings."

In a journal entry posted on the CBSNews.com Web site, Rather further
lamented, "This convention really is duller than those ... held four
years ago. Inside the (convention) hall, it's scripted down to the
nanosecond."

The bare-bones one-hour treatment of the Democratic convention's first
night by ABC, NBC and CBS certainly generated little enthusiasm among
viewers.

During that hour on Monday, the Big Three broadcasters and three cable
news outlets -- CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC -- drew an average
combined audience of 18.5 million viewers, down nearly 2 million from
the total for the first night of the event four years ago, according
to Nielsen Media Research.

CSI DOES BETTER

For the broadcast networks alone, the decline was even sharper, down
from 17.6 million viewers in 2000 to 13.4 million on Monday night. By
comparison nearly 12 million viewers tuned into a rerun of "CSI:
Miami" on CBS in the hour before the convention telecast began.

The cable news channels, which are offering gavel-to-gavel coverage
just like the major networks used to do, saw their audiences nearly
double, from 2.7 million viewers combined four years ago to 5 million
this year, Nielsen said....continued





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In First Dem Debate, Kerry Strongly Supported President’s Action In
Iraq. KERRY: "George, I said at
the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater
opportunity, but I think it was
the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President
made the decision, I supported him,
and I support the fact that we did disarm him. (ABC News, Democrat
Presidential Candidate Debate,
Columbia, SC, 5/4/03)