Gingrich who has proclaimed that he is the best debater and showed both his debate political skills last Thursday when he turned a potentially embarrassing question on his second marriage into an attack on CNN’s John King and the mainstream media has had a week only slightly better than Mitt Romney’s bad South Carolina week.

In the first Florida debate this week on Monday night, NBC’s Brian Williams, took away one of Gingrich’s best weapons when he silenced the crowd before the debate began, which led to a rather dull session and the normally fiery Gingrich acting and looking like a neutered puppy.

And just like Romney who had a bad first debate in South Carolina and followed it up with an almost equally bad second debate, Gingrich’s performance last night was disappointing as he failed to land any significant punches at Romney.

Gingrich did try for a “John King moment” with CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer, but Blitzer is no patsy and rather than play Newt’s game continued to press the former Speaker and gained the upper hand.

Newt has had other problems in Florida, including the removal of an ad that called Romney “anti-immigrant” after Sen. Marco Rubio complained about the ad.

Gingrich also lost on his argument that Romney had sizable investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which Romney explained were mostly through mutual funds and pointed out that Gingrich also had investments in these same companies in funds he owned.

This isn’t to say that Romney had smooth sailing during the debates this week, but overall his combativeness seemed to put Newt into more of a defensive crouch and I expect that the next set of polls that will be taken to reflect last night’s debate will show the momentum has shifted back to Romney as a critical time in the campaign.

Rick Santorum may have had said it best when he asked Gingrich and Romney to call off the personal attacks and get to the issues.

Until they do, Obama and the DNC can sit back and watch the sideshow that has become the GOP presidential race.

Conservatives and other observers had criticized the debate for the slow plodding pace and the questions that were asked in the second hour that covered subjects that had little or no national importnace at a time when the economy and jobs are foremost on voters minds.

Yet despite the complaints and my own prediction that the debate would continue the downtrend in the ratings, it turns out NBC attracted one of the largest audiences to date and shattered the previous high in the key A25-54 demo by a wide margin.

Initial ratings show that 7.1 million viewers tuned in to watch Brian Williams grill the remaining GOP candidates ranking 2nd only behind the ABC debate on December 10 of last year in the current cycle.  Even better for NBC were the nearly 2.6 million viewers in the key A25-54 demo that advertisers crave, easily beating the previous high of 2.1 million set by ABC.

While the format was a little different- Williams had in essence silenced the audience, NBC benefited greatly from Newt Gingrich’s stunning South Carolina primary victory last week which turned the GOP race into a fierce fight.

It also didn’t hurt that Gingrich had a very successful debate last Thursday, when he blasted CNN’s John King for starting the debate off with a question about his second wife’s charges that Newt wanted an “open marriage” which raised the roof and may have raised the hopes of those watching on Monday that Gingrich would take a similar stab at Brian Williams.

But it didn’t happen and instead viewers were treated to one of the worst debates of the election cycle.

Yet with those ratings NBC isn’t about to complain.

To capitalize on this skepticism Fox News’ Brett Baier who moderated the South Carolina GOP debate on Monday revealed to the New York Times that he wasn’t satisfied with the answers Romney has given on several subject and decided that it was time to get tough on him even if his opponents wouldn’t.

In a rare behind the scenes look at debate preparation at Fox, the New York Times‘ Jeremy Peters reports on what went on as Baier and his fellow questioners readied themselves for the nationally televised debate.

There is no doubt that despite the fact that Baier’s bosses had the final say on the questions to be asked, that he wielded a great deal of leeway.

Baier whose interview with Romney in November seemed to rattle the candidate said that he is just trying to get to the truth.

Here are the results from the Twitter blog.

Newt Gingrich
After a slow start and a net #dodge rating for an answer on his recent attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, Gingrich elicited strong #answer ratings for much of the remainder of the debate. His highest #answer peaks came during his comments on unemployment and his reply to Juan Williams about characterizing President Obama as a “food stamp President.”

Mitt Romney
While generating the highest total volume of Tweets among the candidates, Romney spent most of the debate with net Twitter user reaction firmly in #dodge territory. The former Massachusetts governor’s explanation for not releasing his tax records generated the most significant #dodge reaction, but Romney scored #answer ratings for his replies on Medicare and Social Security reform and his refusal to negotiate with the Taliban.

Rick Perry’s biggest Twitter reaction came right at the end of the debate, as Twitter users rewarded him by noting #answer for his response to a question on immigration.

Users tweeted that Rick Santorum’s biggest #dodge of the night was in his answers to questions on gun control, but they applauded his answers on employment.

Ron Paul saw his most significant number of #dodge votes in answers around foreign policy

This wasn’t a scientific analysis since it relied on Twitter users and they can be notoriously fickle, but it was an interesting engagement device to keep users tweeting above and beyond the normal banter that occurs during a debate.

The long time CBS news magazine finished in 5th place for the week drawing 18 million viewers with a 5.9 rating in the A25-54 demo and 4.8 rating in the A18-49 demo which was the best since November 16,2008 when the program featured newly-elected president Barack Obama.

Tebow led the Broncos to a thrilling overtime victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers with an 80-yard touchdown throw on the first play in overtime which led right into “60 Minutes” .  The game attracted 41.9 million viewers and apparently many of them, especially the younger ones, didn’t change the channel when the game ended.

While we won’t see CBS execs publicly admit it, they were probably doing a little “Tebowing” in their offices after seeing the ratings results.

CBS will have another chance this weekend when Denver plays New England for the right to advance to the AFC championship game and should attract another large audience if Tebow can keep it close as he battles the Patriots popular quarterback Tom Brady.

Even though one team will lose, it is a win-win for CBS even if it is on a Saturday.

The victory came despite a heavy barrage of attacks on Romney’s time as the CEO of  private equity firm Bain Capital where Romney accumulated most of his overall wealth.

While there is nothing wrong in attacking an opponent, it is the level and intensity of the attacks launched by Newt Gingrich that have raised the ire of conservatives.

Gingrich who promised to run a positive campaign in Iowa and was largely undone by Romney’s SuperPAC ads, put on his boxing gloves and hit Romney with Super PAC ads of his own as well as statements on the campaign trail that heavily criticized the former Massachusetts governor for the tactics Bain used in buying and restructuring companies while he was CEO.

The problem with the attacks is that they in essence criticized Romney for being a capitalist and served only to delight Democrats for having done the work for them.

Romney, who is the current front-runner for the Republican nomination spent the last week fending off the criticism, and it didn’t appear to hurt him too much if at all in New Hampshire, but if Gingrich keeps this up, it could seriously wound Romney’s campaign as he heads to South Carolina.

While Gingrich foundered in new Hampshire and is liming into South Carolina, he has managed to raise the ire of Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives who claim that the ads, as well as a forthcoming mini-movie are not helping the GOP, but doing the work of Obama and the DNC for them.   Others have compared Gingrich to members of the Occupy movement by labeling Romney as a “one-percenter” at a time when that has a largely negative connotation.

Even Rick Perry who is barely hanging on at this point has called Romney a “vulture capitalist” and not a “venture capitalist”.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, many of the companies Bain invested in during Romney’s tenure went bust, but several were very successful.  Bain had hoped that most if not all their investments would be successful and profitable, but they also knew that they were investing in distressed companies and that nothing is guaranteed.

It’s never easy when people lose their jobs and companies go out of business, but that is our system.  Bain wanted to make their investments work out for all involved, but sometimes businesses are just too far gone for that to occur.

If Romney wins the nomination and the right to face President Obama in November, you can bet that after watching Gingrich’s ability to ding Romney on his role at Bain, it will be a central part of the Democrats campaign against him.

All the Republicans have to do is look and see how giddy Chris Matthews and the gang are at MSNBC as well as Obama’s own advisers to know that they the anti-Bain campaign will come back to haunt them in November.

Last night Matthews brought up the French issue in not one, but TWO segments.

The first is his informal poll at Java Joe’s where with the help of a mostly liberal audience he was able to paint Romney as an elitist for being able to speak French but declining to do so for Matthews.

It starts at about 1:30 in to the segment.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#45850043

In the very next segment Matthews played his question asking Romney to say “Let them eat cake” in French” which Romney declined to do.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#45850181

That was the burning question of the day?

Sounds like Matthews is creating a little class warfare by labeling the French as elitist.

The email which was supposed to have been sent to 300 people who had recently canceled their subscriptions, instead went out to 8 million people, which the paper had email addresses for.

I was one of those 8 million people.

When I received the email I thought it was curious since I had canceled my subscription more than two years ago and switched to the cheaper Kindle version.  But I just brushed it off as a computer error.  Little did I know it was a large error which may have been attributable to a Times employee who goofed big time.

Here’s the email.

Even with the 50% discount, a subscription will still cost almost 60% more than the Kindle version, which is a good reason to pass on the offer.

But never fear the paper isn’t going to honor the discounts anyway.

From TV Newser:

According to ABC’s “Good Morning America,” at 7:03 AM this morning, the capital of South Korea has some “Soul”:

The capital of South Korea is of course spelled “Seoul” in the traditional Latin alphabet.

I’ve been to Seoul and my wife is Korean and she says some of the traditional dishes may be considered”soul food”, just not the capital.

]]> http://mediacrank.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/gma-gives-south-korea-some-soul/feed/ 0 mediacrank GMASoul http://mediacrank.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/newsweeks-michelle-goldberg-republican-candidates-are-racing-to-the-bottom/ http://mediacrank.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/newsweeks-michelle-goldberg-republican-candidates-are-racing-to-the-bottom/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:20:12 +0000 mediacrank http://mediacrank.wordpress.com/?p=972 ]]> Last night on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews  during a discussion of  Saturday’s GOP debate, Newsweek’s Michelle Goldberg said the debates diminish the Republican party because it’s such a race to the bottom.

Goldberg added that Fred Barnes was wrong when he wrote that the liberal media is making the GOP look bad at the debates and that “The Republican candidates are making themselves look bad all by themselves, ” and that they are “diminished by this process because it’s such a race to the bottom, but that’s where their base is.”

Leave it to Matthews to bring on yet another Obama cheerleader to disparage the Republicans, while praising Obama’s less than sterling performance on “^0″ Minutes Sunday night by calling him “dignified.”

Matthews and other members of the mainstream media are truly enjoying watching the Republican presidential nomination play out and only add credence to Barnes’ assertion that the liberal media  is making more out of the entire process than is deserved.

Watch the segment here.