A year ago today CNN aired its first presidential debate. 365 days later, CNN’s senior VP and Washington Bureau chief David Bohrman thinks “the most remarkable day” of this long primary season was Saturday’s DNC rules committee meeting.
“For 200 years that process happened in back rooms. There was passion, there was argument [and] it was all on TV,” Bohrman tells TVNewser. And for CNN, it was another big day for its political programming. The network drew the most viewers in the A25-45 demo (295K to MSNBC’s 282K to FNC’s 167K) when measured from 9am-8pm. The DNC meeting ran from 9:30am-7:15pm, with MSNBC winning the 10am-7pm period in the demo. Fox News did not air gavel-to-gavel coverage. In Total Viewers from 9a-8p CNN averaged 992K, to FNC’s 772K to MSNBC’s 760K.
And as for Sunday’s coverage of the Puerto Rico Primary, was it worth spending a reported $100,000 on those exit polls?
“It was significantly less” than $100,000, Bohrman says. “But we got a lot of really interesting information. The exit polls were dead on,” he says. The consortium of the networks and the AP have been splitting the cost of exit polls six ways, but during a meeting in April the others chose not to join in. At least one network asked to participate last week, but Bohrman said, “No thanks. Our polling director spent 30 hours on the questionnaire. They weren’t there,” Bohrman says. “Yeah, we could have laid off the expense on them, but it was a competitive moment.” All three networks called Puerto Rico for Sen. Clinton at 3pmET. From 3pm-4pmET on Sunday, FNC drew the most viewers in the A25-54 demo (214K), followed by MSNBC (183K), then CNN (165K).
So how will Bohrman and the BPTOT keep viewers interested until the conventions? “I don’t think there’s going to be much of a dip here,” he predicts. “I think there’s going to be candidate exhaustion, and I think the democratic and republican parties are going to begin to morph into the national campaign.”