'DONAHUE' DEBUT DRAWS FEW VIEWERS
By DON KAPLAN
The ratings for TV vet Phil Donahue's new talk show are almost too low to track.
The ratings for "Donahue" scored a .1 rating last Friday - that means fewer than 136,000 viewers nationwide were tuned in during MSNBC's hour-long 8 p.m. talk show.
How bad is that?
"Donahue's show drew a total U.S. audience a little more than twice the size of [a capacity crowd at] Yankee Stadium," cracked one industry observer.
The same night Donahue's arch-rival, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly - the highest-rated talk-show host on cable - snared about 1.1 million viewers during the same time period, while CNN's "Connie Chung Tonight" had 599,000 viewers, according to Nielsen's total U.S. ratings.
A .1 is not the lowest rating possible. But Nielsen experts say its almost as low as their system can record.
Shows that draw fewer viewers are identified with hash marks, while shows that score no viewers - a near impossible occurrence - score a 0 or are just left blank on the ratings chart.
Fox News Channel is a division of News Corp., which also owns The Post.