Cbs

I really enjoyed David Zurawik 's column about the Super Bowl game ("For biggest game of the year, CBS again drops the ball," Feb. 4). I'm not a football fan, but did want to support and cheer on the Ravens. I was appalled at the biased coverage of the game. It seemed to me that the announcers were watching another game, one in which the 49ers were Gods and the Ravens weren't even playing. I asked the people around me - are sports commentators always like this? Aren't they supposed to appear to be neutral?

Joe Flacco must have been a strong enough draw Monday night to leave David Letterman wanting more Baltimore Ravens Super Bowl mojo. The "Late Show with David Letterman" Wednesday announced that Ravens coach John Harbaugh will be on Thursday night. Here's the release from CBS: John Harbaugh, head coach of the Super Bowl XLVII champion Baltimore Ravens, will visit the LATE SHOW with DAVID LETTERMAN Thursday, Feb. 7 (11:35 PM-12:37 AM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.  John Harbaugh and his younger brother Jim Harbaugh, head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, became the first pair of brothers to serve as head coaches in the NFL back in 2011 and made more headlines this year when they became the first brothers in NFL history to face each other in a Super Bowl, one which quickly became dubbed the “Harbaugh Bowl.”  The Ravens went on to defeat the 49ers Sunday in Super Bowl XLVII by a score of 34-31, giving the Ravens their second championship title in franchise history.

Sunday's Super Bowl was the most viewed show in U.S. television history, according to Nielsen figures provided by CBS. A total audience of 164.1 million saw the Ravens victory over the San Francisco 49ers. The average audience for Sunday's game was 108.4 million viewers, which was the third largest average audience behind the last two Super Bowls. Total viewership is generally considered the benchmark figure. Here's the CBS release: The 2012 NFL season concluded with another television milestone as Super Bowl XLVII on CBS reached a total audience of 164.1 million viewers (6:32-8:41 and 9:11-10:47 PM, ET)

UPDATE (1 a.m.) at end of post with review of NFL Network's excellent post-game show and comment on Flacco profanity after game. It was a fabulous day and night for TV football, with the Ravens winning the Super Bowl , 34-31. But little thanks for that goes to CBS, the network that had broadcast rights to the game. The network's pregame show was overproduced and under-imagined, with no unifying vision. One segment that found Boomer Esiason and Shannon Sharpe walking the streets of New Orleans handing out Pizza Hut pizzas to people willing to yell "hut, hut, hut," set a new low in debasing broadcasters and turning what is already an over-commercialized production into a nonstop advertisement.

CBS Sports will cover the Super Bowl with 62 cameras, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said in a teleconference Thursday promoting the Feb. 3 game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers. "That includes all of the unmanned cameras," he said. "It includes any aerial cameras we might have. But listen, there are a lot of cameras ... " By comparison, the norm for Baltimore Ravens games, which were usually covered by second- or third-string CBS crews this year, has been 9 to 12 cameras.

Good news for Baltimore Ravens fans who have suffered through second and third string CBS coverage this season: Sunday's AFC championship game against the New England Patriots will get the full Super Bowl treatment, according to the network. "We will have in this broadcast Sunday our whole setup that we will have down in New Orleans for Super Bowl XLVII - with all the cameras, with all the tape machines, with extra microphones on the field," producer Lance Barrow said during a teleconference Tuesday.

It almost seems wrong to complain about the telecast of a game that ended as happily as Sunday's AFC championship victory by the Baltimore Ravens 28-13 over the New England Patriots. Almost. But CBS Sports once again failed to deliver the goods on a Ravens game. And just because I'm euphoric over the Ravens' victory doesn't mean I should soft pedal how much I hated the telecast. Last week, CBS Sports brass boasted about the Super-Bowl cameras and technology they were going to have on hand for the game.

Sunday's AFC championship game between the Baltimore Ravens and New England Patriots was the most watched TV program since last year's Super Bowl. A national audience of 47.7 million watched the Ravens beat the Patriots 28-13 to advance to the Super Bowl on Feb. 3, according to Nielsen's Fast National ratings. The San Francisco 49ers victory over the Atlanta Falcons was seen by 42 million viewers Sunday on Fox. The Ravens game was carried on CBS, which will also telecast the Super Bowl.

I like Oprah Winfrey, and I was happy to see her Tuesday morning on CBS with her old pal, Gayle King, hitting on all cylinders as they hyped the gate for her interview with Lance Armstrong. She promised King, Charlie Rose and everyone else on the last-place morning show set, "You will be satisfied," by the interview that airs Thursday night on the OWN cable channel. "You will come away understanding that he brought it," she said, though she did hedge on the  specific extent of his confession versus her expectations.

CBS came into Saturday's game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Denver Broncos with a clear story line in its mind: Peyton Manning is God, and all our cameras and announcers are here to worship him. During the first quarter, viewers saw more close-ups of Manning's right-hand glove than the one Johnnie Cochran made famous during the O.J. Simpson trial. And when Manning started to struggle in the second half and gave up a key fumble, analyst Dan Dierdorf told viewers during the replay and review, it wasn't a fumble at all, it was an incompletion.