AC 360 Q3 Numbers Leak…
Someone really has it in for Anderson Cooper. Business Insider has been getting advanced leaks of AC360’s numbers, and basically nobody else’s, for a while now and today is no exception…
The first hour of “Anderson Cooper 360,” which airs nightly from 10 to midnight, just had its worst quarter ever both in total viewers and in the 25-54 age demographic, according to Nielsen Media Research.
During the third quarter of 2010, which ran from June 28 to September 24, Cooper averaged 582,000 total viewers and 180,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo, according to Nielsen. For some context, that’s down from 1.2 million total viewers and 424,000 demo viewers in the third quarter of 2008.
No doubt about it. The numbers are bad. But who has picked Business Insider to torpedo Cooper with bad numbers?
Inside Cable News 
September 28, 2010 at 11:46 am
Why do they replay AC360 at 11? That seems stupid to me. No way you can retain many viewers hour to hour except people who tune in late. They should put the Park/Spit show at 11 up against O’Reilly and Olby repeats.
September 28, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Seems pretty obvious that MSNBC has ample incentive to make Cooper seem like a ship taking on water
September 28, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Poor Coop… I like the guy, but his show is boring, and his personality doesn’t show much. It’s no wonder people don’t tune in.
September 28, 2010 at 2:40 pm
IMO, AC360 has been in the ratings crapper since JK decided to make it a two hour program.
September 28, 2010 at 2:43 pm
I have a fix for AC360: Griffin Cooper.
September 28, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Griffin Cooper would be better than Parker Spitzer
September 28, 2010 at 3:23 pm
I read something in the Klein articles of the last few days (can’t remember where) that seems to apply to Cooper as well as Blitzer King & Crowley.
It went something like ‘Jon Klein took a bunch of very good reporters and made bad hosts out of them.’ Cooper fits into that mold; a very good reporter that doesn’t look comfortable in the studio and thus isn’t very good as a host..
September 28, 2010 at 3:26 pm
They had Aaron Brown hosting a decent news hour, and AC standing on piles weeping. It worked great, so they pulled Coop off the pile and dropped him in Aaron’s chair. Brilliant.
September 28, 2010 at 3:30 pm
fritz, I believe that was a Spud quote.
September 28, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Cooper has a lot of hosting experience with ABC News and a reality show. I think the quote applies more to John King and Wolf Blitzer.
September 28, 2010 at 4:48 pm
“I believe that was a Spud quote.”
Thanks terance.
“Cooper has a lot of hosting experience with ABC News and a reality show.”
He was mostly a reporter at ABC and a weekend news host for awhile and ‘The Mole’ isn’t exactly ‘AC360’ so I think his work at CNN is quite different than his ABC stint.
September 28, 2010 at 4:53 pm
AC started at ABC in the overnight anchor chair. Ironically, the same chair Aaron Brown had previously filled, and the results were the same: Brown was good, Coop was dull.
September 28, 2010 at 5:08 pm
But he wears tight shirts and has gunmetal gray hair! Clearly this means he should have a primetime cable news show.
September 28, 2010 at 6:29 pm
“But he wears tight shirts and has gunmetal gray hair! Clearly this means he should have a primetime cable news show.”
That appears to be what CNN thought at the time.
September 28, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Is Cooper’s show really that bad? I don’t think so. And I don’t think he’s all that boring, either. Maybe it’s just the wrong time to be on that network. Put another way, Greta Van Susteren’s show on FNC gets the ratings. But take her exact same programme and transplant it to the same timeslot on CNN and I bet it’d be circling the drain in no time.
Time for CNN to be reinvented.
September 28, 2010 at 10:23 pm
^ Time for Greta to stop hosting the Sarah Palin infomercial. Watching now; it’s embarrassing.
September 28, 2010 at 10:55 pm
fritz, I believe that was a Spud quote.
A more exact quote was “Klein has at times seemed hell bent on staffing his news desks with Grade A reporters who turned out to be Grade B anchors”
I don’t say Klein ruined them. Just that they didn’t have what it takes to be top line anchors. I’m not going to name names but you can guess who I refer to…
September 28, 2010 at 11:03 pm
— Sarah Palin infomercial —
”That’s a great question, Greta..”
September 28, 2010 at 11:04 pm
I’m not going to name names but you can guess who I refer to…
It’s your blog. Why wouldn’t you name names?