U.S. News' Washington Whispers
says:
Is Washington already bored with new Senate star Barack Obama ? In his two Sunday talk show appearances this month, the programs finished dead last in the all important Washington market. "He's Sunday poison," says a TV exec.
Problem is, as Obama's people clarified in that piece, that Obama's This Week appearance garnered the second-largest national audiencee for the show in all of 2005. Hardly "Sunday poison".
FishbowlDC points us to the person spreading the anti-Obama smear: Fox News Channel's PR flack Paul Shur.
We read the item with one question in mind: Where did it come from? Well, it wasn't any of the Big Three networks, who have been fighting to land Obama, and have good ratings to show for doing so. Overall few people in the industry really take the D.C. ratings market seriously over everything else.
In fact, there's actually only one network who pushes D.C. market numbers to the exclusion of all others: that would be Fox's D.C. spokesman Paul Schur, who most Mondays quickly sends around the overnight ratings for the local market (where Fox does very well) and ignores the larger national ratings (where Fox does pretty poorly).
Given that background, dollars to donuts, that "Washington Whispers" column came out of lunch the two Pauls had together at Chef Geoff's last Wednesday.
We knew that FNC was the propaganda arm of the RNC. But now they're branching out into PR flacking against Democrats to other media outlets?