Wednesday, June 28, 2006

The vindication of Aaron Brown

CNN, which dumped "Newsnight" and its anchor Aaron Brown in favor of "it" boy Anderson Cooper, is reaping a meager harvest. Cooper has not managed to hold on to the ratings spike he received after his coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

In fact, he is not even performing as well as the man he replaced.

It’s not just that Anderson Cooper 360 doesn’t get American Idol ratings. Or that it doesn’t get Grey’s Anatomy ratings or O’Reilly Factor ratings or On the Record with Greta van Susteren ratings.

Many nights, Mr. Cooper doesn’t even do as well as his predecessor Aaron Brown, the ice to his fire, the old-fashioned, bespectacled anchor who was booted in 2005 to make room for Mr. Cooper.

CNN president Jon Klein calls Mr. Cooper “the anti-anchor.” If an anchor is someone people regularly watch host a news program, Mr. Klein may be onto something.

In April, Mr. Cooper’s ratings were down more than 20 percent—and 36 percent in the 25-to-54 demographic—from Mr. Brown’s numbers the previous April.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, Anderson's doing pretty well and better than Aaron in the demo numbers. This is from TVNewser:

A Closer Look At Anderson's Ratings

You can slice and dice Anderson Cooper's ratings a thousand different ways. In today's Observer, Rebecca Dana notes that his numbers were down in April, up in May, and down just a hair in June.

In the second quarter, Cooper had the #3 show on CNN, behind King and Dobbs. From 10pm to midnight, he averaged 205,000 demo and 606,000 viewers. From 10 to 11pm, he averaged 219,000 demo viewers -- down 3 percent from Aaron Brown's 226,000 demo viewers for NewsNight in the second quarter of 2005.

It takes a pretty wild imagination to think Cooper is doing poorly. In June, he "was within 15 percent of Greta's ratings" in the demo, a CNN tipster notes. "That is the narrowest gap of any CNN show and FAR closer than Aaron Brown ever came to Greta (except the month of Katrina when, oh yeah, Anderson co-anchored it.)"

In June 2006, Cooper averaged 252,000 demo viewers while Greta had 291,000. Cooper's CNN timeslot was up 21 percent while Greta's was down 39 percent. (Call that the Natalee Holloway effect.) Between 10pm and midnight, Cooper averaged 225,000 demo viewers, while FNC averaged 288,000. "Cooper's ratings for June are 36 percent over June 2005," the AP noted yesterday.