By RODNEY HO/ rho@ajc.com, originally filed Wednesday, September 16, 2015
On a night when NBC's "America's Got Talent" will air its usually highly rated season finale, it will compete with a network that normally gets a tiny fraction of NBC's audience: Atlanta-based CNN.
Why? CNN is airing the second Republican primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. tonight at 8. As Donald Trump might say, it's going to be HUGE.
Jeff Zucker, who runs CNN but used to oversee NBC, is probably having a chuckle over the timing.
The first debate last month drew a whopping 25 million viewers for Fox News, courtesy of the Trump juggernaut. CNN probably won't draw quite as many but when a network typically struggles to draw 1 million viewers on a given night, a 20 million draw would be considered out of this world. (UPDATE: the overnight ratings were close to those of Fox News last month: an average of 22.94 million, with another 4.5 million video stream starts during the debate.)
The highest rated CNN telecast goes back 22 years on November 9, 1993: "Larry King Live" featuring Vice President Al Gore and businessman Ross Perot talking about NAFTA averaged 16.8 million viewers. Yes, free trade with Mexico (as opposed to illegal immigration) was the hot topic at the time.
"It was a big campaign issue of 1992," said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research for ad-buying agency and consultancy Horizon Media in New York, which does some work for CNN. "And people were still interested in what Perot had to say." And CNN's numbers were helped by the fact that the network at the time existed before the World Wide Web, before MSNBC, before Fox News.
That audience for the first debate, by the way, surprised even Fox News. Debates from 2008 and 2012 typically drew 4 to 5 million viewers so clearly, the Trump factor is trumping all.
Tonight, Adgate said, will be "appointment viewing. CNN has exclusivity. And I don't think there has been a political season where this much attention has been paid to the candidates. Or I should say candidate."
CNN, under Zucker over the past three years, tends to focus on one or two stories at a time. It has been obsessively covering Trump because he has been a ratings magnet. The network has done 2,159 stories about him since he announced his candidacy and Sept. 14, according Zignal Labs, a San Francisco-based firm that monitors social, online and traditional media. That's double Jeb Bush. CNN has run many of Trump's speeches live, something it hasn't done much for others.
According to the Wall Street Journal: "From June through August CNN was up 8% in prime-time viewers compared with the same period last year, according to Nielsen. Fox News grew 9% while MSNBC gained 10%"
Even internally, some producers groused to Zucker directly that the coverage is overkill. But one person's overkill is another person's focus. And CNN is laser focused on this open-ended 2016 presidential race, a race which won't end for another 14 months.
"The reality is CNN has always tended to flood the zone from the beginning," said Randy Harber, who retired from CNN in 2002 after 32 years as a producer, mostly in breaking news. "Now they have more resources and do it even more."
He thinks people who tend to avoid Fox News will sample CNN's coverage since the network still is perceived to be middle of the road compared to Fox and MSNBC. And he appreciates the fact Zucker has kept to that mission.
Paul Levenson, an American writer and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University, has followed CNN closely for years. He anticipates "extraordinary success for CNN." (In fact, CNN is charging 40 times more than normal for advertising during the debate and Trump has asked Zucker to donate the proceeds to charity, which isn't happening.)
To him, "this is the best reality television of the summer."
Credit: Rodney Ho
Credit: Rodney Ho
He likes the three moderators. CNN host Jake Tapper, he said, "is forceful, articulate and provocative." Dana Bash, chief political correspondent, "has a cool head. She'll be fine up there." Hugh Hewitt, the conservative talk show host, has already clashed with Trump. "The last thing you want are three milquetoasts up there," he said.
Tapper hopes to create a lot of true debate moments among the 11 candidates during the main draw. "We don't want them to be talking about their stump speeches. We don't want them to be on talking points," Tapper told The Huffington Post. "We want them to be disagreeing with each other. This is a real dogfight, this Republican presidential contest. … We want them to be explaining why them and not their opponents."
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