CBS is benefitting from having a string of Jerry Bruckheimer-produced hits running - both CSI's come to mind. But once again, there's a difference between winning "the overnights" and winning the entire sweep. In fact, you can appear to win a bunch of overnights and still come in second in the total sweep period. Overnights are major markets only, sweeps count everyone metered.
My major beef is that the article does what so many other mainscream media articles do - positing an unfounded supposition as fact without any supporting evidence.
Michael
The media reporting on the media...objective, eh?
When the numbers are tallied, each network is going to crow about how they won in some respect. Even the worst performing daytime drama wins a certain demo in its time period.
You're 100% spot on about the network being carried on the drawing power of tandem CSI shows...they even used two of them as filler for the time slot that was to have the RR slash job. Throw the soft-core Victoria's Secret sideshow into the mix and they have bragging rights.
I've seen numbers twisted nine ways to Sunday just so a station/network can claim SOMETHING. If it's not an outright Ratings win, it's a "The competition skews older" story, a "we have more higher-income viewers" or "we grew audience at a higher rate" bunch of bar graphs.
The way your comment read to me, it seemed that you knew something about how the sweeps work but could use some clarification. No intention of trying to take you to school or anything.