Television Ratings

As the NFL lockout continues, television networks -- which spent billions of dollars to secure broadcasting rights to National Football League games -- are scrambling to fill what could become a gaping hole in their programming schedules.

IBM's Watson supercomputer wasn't The Terminator. But it did easily beat out two human champions in the first game of a much-anticipated Jeopardy! showdown between man and machine. The event is also proving to be a ratings winner for CBS.

Super Bowl XLV, which aired on Fox on Sunday, attracted 111 million viewers, making it the most-watched television program of all time, Nielsen said Monday.

Hulu reached an agreement with Viacom that will once again allow the video site to air episodes of Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" and Stephen Colbert's "The Colbert Report," 11 months after the shows were pulled from the site.

So far, at least, Piers Morgan shows no signs of being CNN's next big star. His ratings have declined steadily, falling below that of his predecessor, Larry King, in his first two weeks on the air. But it may be too early to make a fair comparison.

With the launch of the Apple iPad, the retirement of Larry King and the ascension of WikiLeaks, 2010 was a year for the media history books. Here's columnist Jonathan Berr's list of the top media stories of the year.

Bristol Palin helped boost the viewership for "Dancing with the Stars" when she made it to the final round, while her mother's show, "Sarah Palin's Alaska" got half a million more viewers in the same week.

The new show "Sarah Palin's Alaska" attracted a record number of viewers for its debut on the TLC network Sunday night. According to Nielsen figures, 4.96 million viewers watched the show, double the average viewership for the channel's Sunday prime time shows.

MTV's third-quarter ratings had its largest-ever year-over-year jump for its target 12-to-34-year-old audience, reflecting strong ratings from the Viacom Inc. unit for shows such as "Jersey Shore" and "The 2010 MTV Video Music Awards."

What's hokey, full of hot air and increasingly looking like a Thanksgiving miracle for NBC? The network's 61-year old tradition of broadcasting the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The three-hour broadcast remains as popular with viewers as it was in 1991 -- a feat that's remarkably rare among...