Archive for October 23rd, 2007
A “narrow” 78-18 win
October 23, 2007Who pulled the plug on the worm?
It’s on page five in “The Australian” today but it continues to be one of the more interesting stories coming out of Sunday night’s John Howard, Kevin Rudd debate.
As I said in yesterday’s blog, Nine Network’s feed of the 90-minute debate was interrupted twice and Nine had to take its signal from another channel. Nine’s Ray Martin blamed Howard’s Liberal Party.
Today, the chief executive of the National Press Club, which ran the debate, took the blame and he wasn’t apologizing for it. Nine, he said, had been disobeying the rules so they were no longer entitled to the feed. However, news reports say he told colleagues that the Liberal Party had been “putting the weights on him” over Nine’s “worm,” an on-screen image showing how 70 undecided voters were scoring the two debaters as the event progressed.
Channel Nine and its worm, it turns out, drew more viewers than any of the other channels carrying the debate. The 1.4 million viewers watching Nine saw the 70 undecided voters with dials connected to the worm score a solid win for Rudd.
“The Australian,” which seems to me to be blatantly pro-Liberal Party, reported today that a poll it commissioned found that Rudd won the debate convincingly (70 percent) or marginally (eight percent) while only 18 percent of those polled thought Howard won either convincingly or marginally.
The worm gave Rudd the win by over 65 percent to less than 30 percent for Howard. The pollsters said 78 to 18.
In a column on the same page that gave the poll results today, Matthew Franklin, the chief political correspondent of “The Australian” says, “The Labor leader was widely seen to have scored a narrow victory in the nationally televised debate.”