Olympics get silver to golden ‘Idol’

Channel Island is a new column and blog charting the world of television that will appear daily in The Times and The Times’ website.

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NBC’s PR department is doing its best to spin the Olympics ratings, but the facts aren’t helping.

Wednesday night’s coverage, focused on speed skating and alpine skiing events, rounded up a paltry 15.5 million total viewers, according to early data from Nielsen Media Research, making it the least-watched Olympic night in at least 20 years.

The main culprit? Why, Fox’s “American Idol,” naturally, which offered another two-hour extravaganza, this time of the top 12 male contestants (the females performed Tuesday), including our personal fave, North Carolina’s Bucky Covington, who (nearly) swept away bad memories of Clay Aiken with a smoky rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.” “Idol” racked up an amazing 31.4 million total viewers, for a more than 2-to-1 advantage over the Games. And among adults ages 18 to 49, it was 3 to 1 (a 13.4 rating vs. 4.5). It’s the largest margin by which any competing program has ever beaten Olympics coverage.

The Islander could fill a dissertation with various theories about why the Games have bombed, but, really, isn’t it obvious? Viewers care more about the drama of Bucky than that of Bode. The first 13 days of the Olympics have averaged 20.6 million viewers, down 19% compared with Nagano in 1998 and off a whopping 33% compared with Salt Lake City in 2002.

Wednesday brought a news release with the latest of NBC’s steadily escalating “reach figures” (i.e., viewers who have watched at least six minutes of the Olympics), a standard tool used to plump event ratings that seem a little, well, low. The network now says that 171 million viewers have watched at least part of the Olympics on one of the NBC Universal “platforms.”

The Islander has been wondering whether the network will eventually claim to have reached more people than actually reside in America. This is the Olympics. You gotta dream big.

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CBS’ odd farewell to an arms story

David Martin, the Pentagon correspondent for CBS News, revealed in his blog this week that he spiked a recent story about improvised explosive devices (i.e., insurgents’ homemade bombs) because “a senior military officer” told him it could help the enemy.

As Martin points out, it’s not at all unusual for news organizations to kill stories that might jeopardize national security. But his post is so chockablock with twisted reasoning that it cries out for further investigation, if not a clear and consistent policy statement from CBS News.

Martin writes that deciding whether a story contains “legitimate secrets” is “like the famous definition of pornography -- you know it when you see it.” But isn’t that the point here? He didn’t know it when he saw it. A “senior military officer” had to point it out to him. Then he further clouds the waters by admitting that he “didn’t find [the officer’s] argument about how it would help the enemy very persuasive, but because there’s a war on, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

So, to recap: The military objected to Martin’s report. He doesn’t believe they have any case but relented because “there’s a war on.” And don’t worry how often this happens to other important stories, because Martin knows the boundary when he sees it -- except when he doesn’t!

Paging CBS News chief Sean McManus -- your thoughts, please.

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Seems like a fit for the My generation

Silly TV pundits. Many of us assumed last month, after it was announced that UPN and the WB Network would merge into something called the CW, that many UPN stations not affiliated with the new network -- like, say, KCOP Channel 13 in Los Angeles -- would be left without any prime-time programming. Then they’d have to run “Bernie Mac” and “That ‘70s Show” repeats in prime time. Soon rivers would run backward and the apocalypse would surely follow.

Would Rupert Murdoch let that happen to his TV stations? Of course not!

On Wednesday, Murdoch’s News Corp. announced that it would use some of its existing UPN outlets to kick-start a new TV network called ... um ... My Network. That “My” moniker has a delightful, youthful ring to it ... it sounds so much like that social networking site ... MySpace, right! ... which Rupe also owns and has been mercilessly flogging to the biz press.

Actually, the Fox flacks say My Network has nothing to do with MySpace -- but MySkepticism says MySpace will soon be crawling with promos for the network. And what sort of content will My Network provide? Two new English-language telenovelas (“Desire” and “Secrets”), plus a melange of reality series, game shows and a true-crime show from Fox News Channel, which is rapidly becoming America’s Crime News Leader.

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Channel Island appears at latimes.com/channelisland. Scott Collins can be reached at channelisland@latimes.com.