Columbia Journalism Professor Discusses NBC's Poor Olympic Coverage Ratings
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: If you watched Olympics coverage last evening, you saw sprinter Marion Jones win a gold medal for the 200- meter dash, some women's volleyball and some other events, all some 15-20 hours after they actually happened. Now, if you did not tune in, you were not alone. NBC TV's ratings have not measured up to expectations and there are many reasons for that. Scotti Williston is on the faculty of Columbia University's graduate school of journalism in New York. She joins us in our New York bureau this morning. And she's going to tell us why the viewers are staying away. How are you doing?</s>SCOTTI WILLISTON, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: I'm fine, how are you this morning?</s>HARRIS: I'm a bit frustrated. Have you been as frustrated as I've been in trying to catch up with these events and keep track of anything?</s>WILLISTON: Well, it's just ridiculous. Part of sports is the adrenaline that you get from watching them. It would be like showing the Super Bowl the day after it happened. When you hear Katie in the morning saying now turn down your volume or leave your room if you don't want to hear what happened. You just cannot do a sports event this way.</s>HARRIS: Well, my frustration has been that I've seen more things that have not been sports. I've seen more features on things. I've seen history pieces on World War II. I've seen everything but sports.</s>WILLISTON: Well, I keep thinking: Who else is in the Olympics besides the Americans? If we're not up for a medal, we don't see the event. I also had someone tell me they seem to be targeting women and children, so men have no desire to watch the Olympics.</s>HARRIS: Well, I'm not going to sit here and bash NBC. They've got their own problems with all that. But let me ask you if there's going to be any fallout from all of this. There are a lot of folks who are wondering whether or not this is sort of a death knell for big major coverage of the Olympics. What do you think about that?</s>WILLISTON: I think we're probably going to go back to the way the Olympics were originally covered, which would be highlights in the evening, if you were going to do anything in prime time. I'm not sure anyone will spend the money to do live coverage of it 24 hours, when it's that different a time zone. I think we are going to see, when we have the Olympics here in the states, what happens. But, for the American audience in America, it's not going to be a problem.</s>HARRIS: You don't think that the -- the things like the Internet and these other ways that you can get information -- like, soon you'll able to get information on events like this on your cell phones and on your watches and everything. You don't see these new media coming in and further pushing coverage away from television?</s>WILLISTON: No, because people still want to see what happened. Nobody has a 49-inch computer screen. They still want to see it on television.</s>HARRIS: Yes, well, that may come some day. Who knows? Now, as I understand it, you had your students do a little survey to find out reasons why people have been having some problems following all of this?</s>WILLISTON: Well. we have them go out and interview why people weren't watching the Olympics when they -- and many of them just said: Well, I already know the results. I already know who won. And they got tired of the vignettes. You get excited about an event, and then you go to a nice mellow story about somebody. Then you go back to the adrenaline flow of the event. And then a back to another. So, it became a very up-and-down type of thing and they just didn't enjoy watching it, children did.</s>HARRIS: One other fallout here is that there have big stars made on the border. Some Canadian anchors and people there are being watched quite a bit here in the States. Scotti, we thank you very much for your time and your expertise. We will check and see how things turn out and see if we ever get that 49-inch computer screen, too.</s>WILLISTON: You better believe it. Thank you.</s>HARRIS: Take care.