Donahue off to a slow restart

His ratings have fallen fast after a strong debut. But MSNBC says isn't worried and is in for the long haul.

©Associated Press
September 4, 2002

NEW YORK -- MSNBC insists that establishing a news show is a marathon instead of a sprint. On that basis, Phil Donahue is already several blocks behind in his heralded return to television.

When Donahue's political chat show started July 15, it looked like the beginning of an intriguing competition with CNN's Connie Chung. That week, Chung's news show averaged 710,000 viewers, and Donahue had 660,000.

Yet the gap widened steadily so that by Donahue's fifth week, Chung had double his viewership (700,000 to 328,000).

Donahue rebounded slightly in his sixth week -- the last full week for which Nielsen Media Research figures were available -- but on Aug. 23, the pioneering talk show host suffered an indignity few would have anticipated.

That night -- admittedly a summer Friday when most people aren't interested in topical shows -- he sunk to a 0.1 rating, the lowest Nielsen usually measures. That translates to 136,000 viewers.

His bosses insist they're not worried about Donahue, the linchpin in MSNBC's comeback strategy.

"Everybody here has been in the business for more than 18 months, so they've been through this before," said Jerry Nachman, an MSNBC executive and talk show host. "One of my mantras is, there's nothing harder in life than disabusing people of their habits of getting news."

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, the undisturbed cable news king at 8 p.m., started so slowly, "he laid there like a latke for two years," Nachman said. Most TV executives are more worried about showing year-to-year growth, and MSNBC could claim that in August.

Still, Donahue's situation can't be encouraging for MSNBC, which is emphasizing a political talk format it says is more balanced politically than ratings leader Fox News Channel.

Some of MSNBC's other talk shows also have tiny audiences. Pat Buchanan and Bill Press' show hasn't climbed above a 270,000 average in six weeks. Curtis & Kuby averaged 120,000 viewers in its fifth week on the air. Nachman has done better, but he averaged 210,000 his sixth week. (None of these shows is in prime time, when audiences are larger.) "It's the logical counterprogramming," said news consultant Andrew Tyndall, president of ADT Research. "I'm just not sure there's an audience there."

Traditionally, liberal talk shows have a much harder time finding an audience than those with a conservative host, he said.

Connie Chung Tonight has featured a strong concentration of true-crime stories, particularly about missing children, and seemed better attuned to the news appetite this summer than Donahue, Tyndall said.

Nachman said it wasn't fair to draw conclusions from ratings in the summer, when viewers opt for something lighter or turn off the TV. That's especially true at MSNBC, which has a younger audience than CNN or Fox News Channel, its executives say.

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