With political analysts commenting that President Bush’s planned speech
Thursday night could be his most important since his address to Congress
on Sept. 20, television executives wrestled with the question of whether
to clear a half hour of primetime for it — even though the White House
itself had not requested it.
Two of the networks had a lot to lose: NBC
and CBS each had several of their highest-rated programs airing during
the period.
Today’s New York Times reported that at Fox,
Roger Ailes, who heads all news operations for Fox Broadcasting, made a
decision that would have allowed him to take over network programming.
“We’re at war, and the president is speaking, and we think he will be
making news,” he said early in the day. Later however, he reportedly
received a synopsis of Bush’s speech and decided that it would not
be making news.
That left ABC as the sole broadcast network to carry
it live. Analysts viewed ABC’s decision with cynicism. An executive of a
rival network told today’s Washington Post that by running the
speech, ABC would be able to remove the rating for Whose Line Is It
Anyway, which would have fared poorly.
“They get to take a bad
number out; they’ll get a sustaining number versus a bad number, and no
rating is better than a bad rating,” the exec observed.
