WASHINGTON: Television networks rapidly shifted focus and personnel away from the Republican National Convention to Gulf Coast communities in the path of Hurricane Gustav yesterday, which left Republicans and reporters wondering how much of the RNC would be covered this week.
“We’re going to go with the biggest story of the day,” said Jay Wallace, a news vice president at Fox News Channel, “and right now the biggest story of the day is the storm.” Fox sent Geraldo Rivera and other reporters plus at least a dozen crews to the Gulf. Fox had been anticipating a big week in St. Paul; its ratings topped every broadcast and cable network at the 2004 GOP convention.
For those reporters who stayed behind to cover the convention, even when politics came up in the few reports they filed there, the cable news networks usually kept an angry orange satellite picture of Gustav in the corner.
At one point when former Bush adviser Karl Rove was discussing Republican vice presidential choice Sarah Palin on Fox News Channel, his picture was crowded into one-fourth of the screen. A bright red hurricane insignia spun into the picture, complete with whooshing noise, when MSNBC moved between stories.
But the storm has not blown away the convention’s real purpose — to give Sen. McCain and his vice presidential pick, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as big a boost in the polls as possible.
“Palin gives McCain a big opportunity to put the Obama-Biden Washington politician ticket permanently on the defense,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told reporters.
But politicians are not the only ones on the defense in this political campaign. News networks have also found themselves scrambling for America’s hearts and minds.
More than 40 million people switched on their TV sets to watch Obama’s acceptance speech concluding the Democratic convention in Denver, which is more than double the number that watched Sen. John Kerry accept the Democratic nomination four years ago.
And now, for the first time ever, more viewers — 8.1 million — turned on CNN for a major news event rather than watching any of the so-called “big three” networks — NBC, CBS and ABC. The latter newscast attracted the second-highest numbers of viewers, 6.6 million.
As for CNN’s cable competitors, Fox News Channel and MSNBC attracted 4.2 million and 4.1 million people respectively.
