I am neither a Cramer nor a Stewart fan, but together they're ratings magic.
Jon Stewart’s faceoff with CNBC’s Jim Cramer Thursday night gave “The Daily Show” its second biggest audience this year.
The media-hyped event was seen by 2.3 million total viewers on Comedy Central. That trails only the Inauguration Day episode of “The Daily Show” in 2009, which had 2.6 million viewers. The show was also in the top 10 in the show’s history.
via TVWeek.
I don’t know about magic — in the absolute, it made far less difference than the non promoted Clooney appearance on ER. I ignored the many versions of this info I saw because it’s the TV ratings equivalent of the tech echo chamber. It’s hardly even worth mentioning and only is due to the meme nature of things that drive web traffic.
It bounced 15% versus last week’s numbers. It will definitely come in ahead of That’s So Raven again and that’s more than Battlestar Galactica can say, but hardly magical.
Even if you’re not a fan, I’d definitely recommend watching the clips of that interview. It’s pretty awesome.
I thought the original “rant with clips” by Stewart that precipitated the appearance was hysterical — and I would recommend watching the clip of the original rant. I didn’t think the actual interview was anywhere near as funny as the rant last week.
Robert, last weeks numberw were already boosted by the Cramer(or at the very least CNBC)-Stewart tiff though. There was no Cramer on the show, but Stewart’s histrionics over the Cramer/CNBC stuff had already boosted his normal ratings.
Bill, I don’t think so. Stewart did go off about CNBC on Wednesday of last week, but the whole back and forth didn’t start until Monday.
2.6mil isn’t really that much: even if it was a high it still shows
How far away cable still is from broadcast.
Julia is correct, it was the episode a week ago Wednesday that produced the rant – though that episode was up over the previous week. And my numbers in the first comment were wrong:
Thur 3/12: 2.3 million — Cramer
Wed 3/4: 2.11 million — Rant about
CramerCNBCWed 2/25: 1.88 million –
There was actually a higher percentage improvement from 2/25 to 3/4 than there was from 3/4 to 3/11
Now, see, you’re doing just what Cramer did to cause all of this!
The rant on 3/4 was about CNBC, not about Cramer, though Cramer was in there as part of that. Stewart didn’t rant about Cramer himself until Monday 3/9. And Cramer wasn’t on until Thursday 3/12.
Fixed
But in the original 8 minute-ish rant, Cramer was used several times as an example of CNBC being wrong. But he definitely was not used exclusively!
But my question is how did that rant boost ratings last week? There was no hype about a feud at that point to drive up ratings. Cramer wasn’t bitching about it on his show until after the rant and I don’t think he hit the talk show circuit until Tuesday. So how was the rant responsible for ratings?
Good to see those numbers. I’m a big fan of the Daily Show and It was brilliant how Steward killed Cramer.
Julia, if you’re asking why the ratings increased from 2/25 to 3/4 — I don’t know. Like you, since the rant didn’t happen until that show, I don’t attribute the increases to the rant! I wasn’t listing the rant happening as the reason for the improvement, rather more as a calendar of events.
Ah, gotcha. I wonder if 1.88-2.11 is a normal range for the show. Maybe that’s a normal fluctuation?
Actually, maybe it’s the lead-in. Didn’t Important Things get 1.5 on 2/25 vs 1.9 on 3/4?
In these trying times, it’s nice to know you can completely falsify what another person said (The Daily Show edited Cramer’s commentary to make it look like he was adviseing people to invest in Bear Stearns when he actually was saying it was safe to keep your deposits there-you know, the whole FDIC thing?), and get huge publicity and higher ratings, as well as ridiculous amounts of praise for being a crusading truth-teller, when you’re nothing but the opposite.
This saddens me far more than any “bad shows get renewed, good shows get cancelled” problem.
nyccine, so when they showed Cramer saying straight out, “Please, anyone who is watching this, please please buy Bear Stearns,” there was editing going on?
What exactly happened? I heard a little about it, but dont exactly know what the big deal is.
comedy central also runs the daily show in primetime the day after. I wonder what the numbers look like if you combine the multiple airings of the cramer show.
The day I trust Jon Stewart for reliable information and facts is the day hell freezes over. I’m amazed at how many people think this guy is the least bit credible…
@Dave — Comedy central reruns The Daily Show in several slots. But for the week ending 3/8, the 8p-8:30 reruns on Mon-Fri averaged between 594K and 972K (the 972K was on Thursday, the rebroadcast of Weds’ 10:59p-11:30p rebroadcast of the CNBC rant)