As for the crackup in complex mortgage-backed securities, now at the center of the debt predicament, the global bank UBS has justly called it "the biggest failure of ratings and risk management ever".
One factor was the 1988 ratings failure of "War and Remembrance," the monstrously expensive, 30-hour sequel to the successful mini-series "The Winds of War".
I'm not actually sure what a C2DE viewer is – but any hint of popularity among this demographic is but a fig leaf concealing a naked ratings failure.
He specializes in the rube who is actually intelligent as well as good-natured, a part he played so well in "Welcome to New York," one of last year's smarter comedy efforts but a ratings failure.
The actual risk involved in various tranches wasn't clear given thinking about things like correlations, and there were insufficient backup systems in place to guard against systemic failure at the ratings agencies.
The critics are right that WBBM's program had production flaws that probably contributed to its failure to gain ratings satisfactory to management, but there is a more serious cause for its failure -- one that plays right into the presidential election's concentration on the failure of our educational system.
Though the end of The Nightly Show eliminates a rare black-hosted program from the mainstream airwaves, Alterman dismissed any suggestion that race played a role in the show's ratings failure or that a minority host might not be considered in the future.
Indeed, we're talking about a president whose major accomplishments thus far include near-constant chaos, a gigantic public legislative failure, and approval ratings that are setting all the wrong records.
ITV's limited portfolio of comedy meant that although it was a ratings failure, the pilot was selected by default to represent the network at the Montreux Television Festival that year.
The common refrain of media companies promoting infotainment is that they're simply giving the people the news they want -- that forcing viewers to eat news broccoli (or reporting on community affairs, politics and the economy) is a recipe for ratings failure.
