Glenn Dyer’s TV Ratings

Another rotten night for Ten as The Biggest Loser: Transformed again made a liar of itself – it is still the old slider we got to know last year and the year before. Three times a turkey should be enough and you have to wonder if Ten will be around next year to broadcast, or even around later this year to assess whether to renew it. Ten will grab onto the fact that TBL managed its first metro audience rise – from 305,000 on Sunday night to 335,000 last night – stop the presses, TBL viewers surge by 10%!

But Ten was again well beaten by the ABC into 4th spot, even though the ABC had another weak Monday night, with the programming from 7pm News on dipping lower. In fact The 7pm news had 697,000 metro viewers and it was downhill from there, not one other program managed to get half a million or more metro viewers and Q&A ended the night with 396,000.

National figures were not available at time of this report being compiled because of technical difficulties, with problems with figures from the regions. But we know that Nine easily won last night — overall and the demos and Seven was second, the ABC third and Ten a weak 4th. Married at First Sight again dominated, followed by My Kitchen Rules and Seven News.

In breakfast, Today (276,000) started the week with another loss to Sunrise (303,000). The slide continues.

Q&A undermined its credibility again. Tony Jones allowed a right-winger to put a question to the panel unchallenged as to his identity. A man called Edwin Nelson asked a question about Donald Trump and his claims of fake news against media such as the New York Times and CNN and whether this applied to the ABC as well. Well, as various media reports have pointed out Mr Nelson was last in the public eye 11 months ago when, as a staffer for NSW MP, Kevin Connolly when his facebook activity gave us the headline “MP’s staffer compares homosexuality to incest in Facebook post”.

Now does anyone remember the 2015 kerfuffle generated by the question Muslim man, Zacky Mallah asked on Q&A about ‘radicalisation’ and how the ABC was attacked bitterly by the right for not checking who he was and his background.

I can bet that the News Corp attack dogs will not attack Q&A or the ABC management or Mr Nelson for his question last night because he reflects their view that the ABC is a hot bed of ‘liberalism’ and left-wingers. And yet the principle is the same for both Mr Mallah and Mr Nelson – disclosure of who they are and their background.But in both cases the management of Q&A did not do their background checks with sufficient diligence.

Network channel share: