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Chilling ‘Cheney’s Law,’ DVR ratings piling up
Wanna make your blood boil? Take a gander at tonight’s installment of the bold and always provocative documentary series “Frontline.”
The PBS program (8 p.m. on KLRU Channel 18), titled “Cheney’s Law,” unveils Vice President Dick Cheney’s crusade for presidential privilege dating back to his days as chief of staff for President Gerald Ford and revving up considerably after the attacks of Sept. 11.
Cheney’s push to expand executive authority is hardly news. The veep has been growling at congressional and judicial checks and balances — loudly and very much in the public eye — on behalf of President Bush and the war on terror.
But weaving together three decades of Cheney’s political passion produces a particularly chilling portrait of executive power gone amok.
Anyone who followed the Washington Post’s summer series on the vice president’s behind-the-scenes dealings will recognize many of the same efforts — intelligence gathering without oversight, interrogation and torture of certain “enemies,” random wiretapping of American citizens, etc.
Critics of Cheney’s policies run the gamut, but one of the most effective (and chilling) in this film is Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor and former Justice Department legal counsel who locked horns with the administration over the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program. Goldsmith is calm, matter-of-fact and utterly devastating in his criticism of the veep’s abuse of executive privilege and destruction of individual liberties.
‘Live+7’ are the real ratings
It took more than two weeks, but Nielsen Media Research finally has tabulated premiere week’s “real ratings,” and a couple of shows got a big boost.
What are real ratings? They’re the audience figures representing live viewing plus recorded viewing sometime during the week after the original broadcast.
The top recorded programs were “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Office,” with both shows boosting their opening night numbers by about 10 percent. “CSI” was still the No. 1 show, but down the list, several shows got substantial increases from DVR inclusion.
NBC’s new drama “Journeyman” rose from 42nd in the rankings to 36th in the live+7 ratings, and the CW’s “Smallville” got a good bump, too, from 76th to 70.
Advertisers and networks are paying more attention to these figures than ever before, and that could help shows — such as “Friday Night Live” — survive even with low live-night ratings.
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