Palin’s “Alaska” Ratings Plunge

24 November 2010 |permalink | email article

On the day Mama Grizzly launched her 16-stop cross-country tour to promote her new book, “America by Heart: Reflections on Faith, Family and Flag,” Sara Palin got a wake-up call. Or better yet, a sign she’s perhaps a future meteor, but never a comet.

As the Daily Beast noted with some satisfaction TLC executives have much less to crow about this week. Ratings for her series tanked after just one episode. The show’s premiere last Sunday had 5 million viewers, a ratings record for a medium-sized network.  But viewers seem to have had their curiosity sated, with a single episode.

Two million, or more than 40 percent, failed to tune in for more, and bad news for TLC. Worse was that the median viewer age for the second episode was 57 – well outside the target adult demographic and fifteen years older than the network’s typical viewer. Oh well, there’s always Fox News to take up the slack!

After Ron there’s Rand

Sen.-elect Rand Paul has inked a deal for his first book. “The Tea Party Goes to Washington.” He will discuss how he plans “to bring the U.S. Government more in line with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to stop spending money the country doesn’t have, to stop borrowing, to balance the budget and reduce the size of government.” One assumes the book’s preamble will include “we’re here to take our country back,” a nod to the No-Nothings, a nativist American movement of the 1840s and 1850s.

Quotable

“We’re in a whole new world…The pope is “implicitly” saying “that you cannot anymore raise the objection than any use of a condom is an intrinsic evil.” – The Rev. Jon Fuller, a Jesuit priest and a physician for H.I.V./AIDs Care and Research at Boston Medical Center noting that Pope Benedict XVI clearly acknowledged on Tuesday that the need to prevent diseases could outweigh the church’s long opposition to the use of condoms.

“The newly elected Republican Majority in the House of Representatives. promising to focus on the economy and jobs, has instead decided that elimination of the nation’s tradition of birthright citizenship should be one of its first priorities.” – An editorial in the Sacramento Bee, noting that in attacking birthright, the GOP ignores history.

201