Duncan Black (Atrios) remarks ironically...

Nobody Could’ve Predicted

That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.

Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.

But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.

All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.

And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light.  But NBC isn’t just a television network.  It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation.  In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about.  So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits?  They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.

Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole.  But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA.  They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line.  No more.  The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.