Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Palin’s star power is the oddest thing ever

Sarah Palin’s worst nightmare, Gryphen at The Immoral Minority, wonders half seriously if Fox Business Channel canned a number of primetime hosts because Palin’s appearance on all three shows doomed them. Yeah, proabably not.

The network has been struggling, with the shows in question scraping the bottom of the cable rankings. Last week’s HuffPost story says “The network has long trailed its major business news rival, CNBC, in the ratings. On Wednesday, for instance, FBN drew just 64,000 total viewers. CNBC drew 187,000. For all of 2011, the gap was even wider: 54,000 versus 228,000.”

The more likely story on Palin:  the Fox employee was deployed to shore up ratings for the business network. Whenever she appears on TV the videos are embedded on blogs across the political spectrum, and maybe the marketing crew thought the foundering shows could pick up some viewers by that route. Her star power is real, but it might not be of quite the right quality to convince her type of fan to become interested in a business channel generally.

And what of that famous Palin star power? It’s the oddest thing ever, isn’t it? A variety of conservative worships her, so they’ll tune in and they’ll read news stories and blog posts whenever her name is in the headline. She’s a pageview phenom for liberal media outlets, too. Libs will click through just to see what the new trolling behavior might be today—hoping to find something to be indignant about. I guess that’s a form of popularity.

Palin bonus: The Baltimore Sun’s TV critic says HBO’s “Game Change” will score Julianne Moore an Emmy, and the TV movie promises to be one of the most culturally important films of the year. Wow. I’d watch it eagerly even if it looked as though it might be really bad (I devoured the book), but this is pretty exciting. Look for ”Game Change” to be talked about. Constantly. It premieres March 10.