very thorough interview with Rachel Maddow

[Donna Halper]

At 06:16 PM 3/9/2009, you wrote:

>I'm as big a Rachel Maddow booster as anyone - indeed, I find her 
>show more enjoyable than Olbermann's much of the time - but the raw 
>viewer numbers, at least, are not kind to the MSNBC lineup and 
>haven't been for a couple of months now.

But Keith regularly beats CNN in his daypart, and Rachel has been in 
a horse race with Larry King.  On the other hand, Scott is correct in 
pointing out that neither Keith nor Rachel comes close to the 
viewership of Fox (whose audience seems to skew much older, btw-- 
Rachel at least has been attracting a younger demo to her show, which 
is something neither Keith nor O'Reilly has been able to do). I think 
given that many cable systems do in fact make it tough to find or get 
MSNBC, and given that at this point in time, the left and the 
progressives are not as motivated as the right and the conservatives 
are to seek out angry opinion shows, the drop in MSNBC's numbers is 
not shocking.  I think MSNBC expected to be down somewhat, but they 
still have a solid niche and their advertisers are continuing to 
support them-- and that means both the night time leftie political 
shows, and the conservative morning show that Joe Scarborough has 
been doing.  I don't think we should be writing the obit for MSNBC just yet.