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American Morning
Oscar Ratings Down
Aired March 27, 2002 - 08:44 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Oscar night was historic all right, but there's one achievement that producers of the Oscar cast would like to forget. On a night the awards reached new heights, the show's TV ratings hit record lows. How do you explain such a historic disappointment?
Well, Jeff Greenfield is here. He's not only our senior analyst, but also a long time expert on the TV scene, and just the man for the job we need this morning. Joins us now, thanks for being with us.
JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SENIOR ANALYST: Good morning.
COOPER: So, let's just talk about ratings, first of all. Let's take a look at the ratings. We have a graphic. 2002, 25.4 percent of U.S. households tuned in to watch the Oscars. 1959, 46.7 percent tuned in to watch. Why the drop?
GREENFIELD: You can look at the specifics that four of the five nominated movies were not mainstream movies. You can look at the fact that Whoopi Goldberg may not have the clout that, say, a Johnny Carson had, but this is part of a much broader television pattern. Nothing on television gets the share of the audience that it used to. Not the World Series, where the ratings were half what they were 20 years ago, not network news. They used to divide 90 percent of the audience, now it's 50. Not the most popular show on television, it gets a 30 share (ph) ...
COOPER: So, basically you are saying the pie is being divided up into smaller and smaller slices.
GREENFIELD: Absolutely. When I want to tell my son how hard I had it as a kid, I don't have those -- I say, you know, Dave (ph), when I was your age, there were only six stations on the air, and you could only watch when it was on, when it was on. He doesn't believe this, but trust me, Anderson, it's true. So when you have 100, 200 possibilities, like you do on digital cable and the satellite, not that there's anything on you want to particularly see, but it's being nibbled to death by ducks. And what's happened is nothing gets that mass audience together, even the Super Bowl, which still gets a humongous share, doesn't get the share it got 20 years ago.
COOPER: Do you tell your son about the time you actually had to get up from the couch to turn the TV station? GREENFIELD: Absolutely. Oh, he doesn't believe that. I say, you know, hey, you know how you had to change the channels, son? Sure. That's also part of it. At the flick of a switch, you can pick from any one of these dozens or hundreds of alternatives.
COOPER: Look, it is easy to bash -- I mean, a lot of people are barbing ABC these days, and as former employees of ABC, it's easier for us, perhaps, than anyone to bash it, but just to be fair, they still get a tremendous audience. Even though the ratings -- the household rating was the lowest ever, the viewing audience was something like 41.8 million viewers. It was the highest rated entertainment show of the year, and the fourth highest rated TV show overall.
GREENFIELD: There are a lot more people in this country than there were 50 years ago, so even though you get a smaller share, you get more eyeballs. That's absolutely true. But when people try to ascribe specific reasons for the decline, the network news is too liberal, your corporate toadies, nothing is good, the fact of the matter is when you have all these other alternatives, you are going to lose that humongous size, except when an extraordinary event happens. Occasionally -- like when "Millionaire" came on on ABC. That's another point. Everybody has his own television set now, which was not true 30 or 40 years ago.
COOPER: Right. And in each household, there's more than one.
GREENFIELD: Sure.
COOPER: Some executives at ABC were saying, look, this just wasn't a good year for the movies, but you're saying that's basically just kind of trying to hide the fact.
GREENFIELD: No, look. It may be true. In 1998, when there was a lot of cable around, the Oscars got an all-time high because everybody had gone to see "Titanic."
COOPER: Right. "Titanic," it was a huge year for them, but I think the lowest overall viewership was the year the "English Patient" was out in '97.
GREENFIELD: It is true that movies -- when movies are nominated that have an edgier or smaller appeal, there is that issue. They haven't called me, but if I were ABC, I would try bring Johnny Carson out of retirement to host the Oscars. I mean, there was a guy who did it for years, had a kind of stability. He was elegant, and funny, and caustic. On the other hand, given their -- ABC's move to the youth market, he hasn't been on the air in ten years, and maybe the younger audience just doesn't who he is.
COOPER: There was an interesting article in the "New York Times" the other day saying that viewership for the cable news broadcast has been up since 9/11, and do you think it is going to continue?
GREENFIELD: No, because I think that is a function of the fallout from September 11, and I hate to be grim about this, but it really depends -- if the United States gets involved, say, in a massive ground war in Iraq, cable news ratings will go up, but we have to remember, cable news measures its audience in the hundreds of thousands. Network news, broadcast news, which measures it in millions, has had one of the networks has a slight up, one has a slight down. Those people who have been reconnected to the news are coming to us and our competitors, but it's in absolute numbers, pretty small.
COOPER: Jeff Greenfield, thanks very much for being with us -- Paula.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, Anderson. Hey Jeff, I have a question for you. So, is what we do called -- do you view it as "sliver casting" now? No more broadcasting, sliver casting.
GREENFIELD: What do you think?
COOPER: Yes. We're talking to a very small audience.
ZAHN: But...
GREENFIELD: But we love them.
ZAHN: No, but the fact is too because of cable having a dual revenue stream, it can be just as profitable as what some of the broadcast networks do. So we're very happy to be in our little universe here.
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