Rachel Maddow Hands Bill O'Reilly His Sorry Ass (Again)

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Rachel Maddow Knows Exactly How To Deal With Fox News.

The Next Time Someone Tries To Tell You Fox News Is Actually News, Show Them This.

From Media Matters:

Rachel Rocks: Maddow Meets The Press.

"Lefty" label or not, when NBC was struggling with their pick to replace Tim Russert on Meet the Press, I'd have chosen Rachel Maddow.

She's smart and fair and not given to TV histrionics--even on cable. And it seems that MTP viewers like her, too

Here's Danny Shea on HuffPo with some TV numbers

"Meet the Press" had a convincing win this past Sunday, taking the top spot among Sunday talk shows with an average of 3.140 million total viewers. That's 17.6% more than second-place "Face The Nation" (2.670 million) and 19.3% more than third-place "This Week" (2.630 million). "Fox News Sunday" averaged 1.190 million total viewers.

"Meet the Press," moderated by David Gregory, featured US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and a roundtable including The New York Times' David Brooks, The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and Republican strategist Mike Murphy.

It was Maddow's second appearance — the first, on August 16, drew 3.359 million total viewers for the show's highest delivery since April.

"Meet the Press" has now won nine consecutive weeks since falling to ABC's "This Week" on August 2.

In a related story, FOX News buffoon Chris Wallace was just handed next Sunday's questions by fellow FOX intern Jesse Watters.

Sick & Wrong.

CNBC's Maria Bartiromo--guesting on MSNBC's Morning Joe--chimes in at 2:39. As I posted here last week, this is the same idiot who asked a 44-year-old congressman why he wasn't on Medicare. Seriously.

Maria Bartiromo is a corporate shill, and to take seriously anything she says regarding health care is similar to trusting Jim Cramer with your appendectomy.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi's excellent piece "Sick and Wrong" is here.

The C-Street Kerfuffle.

(h/t to Jason Linkins.)

Philandering Republicans Mark Sanford and John Ensign have connections to a house in Washington referred to as C Street, and are affiliated with a religious group known as The Family, who organize the National Prayer Breakfast. Sanford and Ensign are getting "counseling" at C Street for their wayward ways, while Ensign actually lives there (no word on if the joint has a hot tub.)

Also in residence is Tennessee Republican Congressman Zach Wamp, and he's out of sorts over a report Rachel Maddow did, based on his hometown paper, the Knoxville News Sentinel:

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Judging by the foibles of Christian hypocrites like Sanford and Ensign, there's more talk about sex at C Street than a strip club at Happy Hour.

It must suck to have spent all that time preaching to others on how to live their lives only to have it become public knowledge that they were "do as I say, not as I do" kind of guys, eh?

Busted!

And as for Rep. Wamp, keeping secrets and bitching about roommates seems a tad tacky, even for uptight GOP Confederates.

The Times They Are A-Changin'.

From DailyFinance.com:

What's the No. 1 brand in cable news? That depends, in part, on how many screens you're counting.
With the second-quarter drawing to a close, Fox News Channel is running up the score on the competition, posting its highest ratings ever and boasting of an evening audience equal to those of CNN, MSNBC and Headline News combined.

But that's only looking at TV. And that's something CNN -- which had its best second quarter since 2003 in total viewers, but fell to third place in primetime in the crucial 25-to-54 demographic -- says it's not doing anymore now that so much news is being consumed on computers and mobile devices.

"We used to be a television business," says Jack Wakshlag, head of research for Turner Broadcasting. "We see our future in terms of being a multi-platform media company. Now we need a metric that will measure our power or our presence across the different platforms."

As it happens, Nielsen, the ratings firm, recently started tracking such a metric. It's called Nielsen Fusion, and it combines viewership and online usage data. The Fusion rankings for April show CNN with a commanding lead over both MSNBC and Fox News when it comes to reach among all viewers. (That's looking at the full day, not just primetime.) CNN (which is part of the same media conglomerate as Daily Finance parent AOL) reached 125.3 million people in April, versus 105.5 milllion for MSNBC and 104.3 million for Fox.

That's not really a surprise. CNN has always beaten Fox and MSNBC in reach, or cumulative audience. (Fox and MSNBC counter that advertisers make their buys based on ratings, not cumulative reach, which doesn't reflect duration of viewership.) And CNN and MSNBC both have a big head start on Fox when it comes to web traffic; the Fox News Digital Network attracts fewer than half the unique visitors of the MSNBC or CNN digital networks (No. 1 and 3 among all news sites, respectively).

But as viewers increasingly migrate their news consumption from televisions to other types of screens, total cross-platform viewership is only going to get more important, says Wakshlag. He notes that 20 million viewers get news from both CNN television and a CNN website in the same month, versus only 9 million who do the same with Fox. "For some reason, they don't have a lot of what we're calling 'integrators,' and we're seeing that as something that really says something about the strength of the brand," he says.

Fox, of course, views CNN's emphasis on a newfangled measurement as a mark of its failure to secure the old-fashioned ratings advertisers care about. "Apparently the sheer embarrassment of getting beat by both Headline News and MSNBC along with the continued implosion of Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper has led CNN to its latest act of desperation," says a Fox News spokesman. "We wish Jack well in continuing to defend their battle for fourth place."

In an unscientific survey conducted by JackRabbit Café, FOX News is unrivaled in boorish, asshole-ish hosts and rampant paranoia, MSNBC leads in cross-promotion with a sister company (NBC) and--in Larry King--CNN employs the world's only living fossil.

"Conservative" Is One Word You Won't See In The DHS Report, But Conservatives Think It's About Them, Anyway..

Pat, The Dry Cleaner Called; Your Hood Is Ready.

Corporate News: Do Shareholders Think They're Editors, Too?

     From the Hollywood Reporter:

     Things got testy Wednesday at the GE shareholders meeting courtesy of several complaints about political bias at its media division, NBC Universal.
     Just don't expect to see the fireworks at the company's webcast of the event, which contains prepared remarks from CEO Jeff Immelt and CFO Keith Sherin but leaves out their interaction with shareholders.
     A GE spokesman clarified that the corporation doesn't typically broadcast the shareholders meeting in its entirety.
     Just before GE board members were re-elected, shareholders asked about 10 questions of a mostly political nature concerning the viewpoints of MSNBC and CNBC, according to attendees.

     First up was a woman asking about a reported meeting in which Immelt and NBC Uni CEO Jeff Zucker supposedly told top CNBC executives and talent to be less critical of President Obama and his policies.
     Immelt acknowledged a meeting took place but said no one at CNBC was told what to say or not say about politics.
     During the woman's follow-up question, her microphone was cut off. Later, during the umpteenth question about MSNBC, another shareholder's microphone was cut, according to multiple attendees.
     "The crowd was very upset with MSNBC because of its leftward tilt," one attendee said. "Some former employees said they were embarrassed by it."
     One specific complaint about MSNBC concerned Keith Olbermann's interview of actress Janeane Garofalo, who likened conservatives to racists and spoke of "the limbic brain inside a right-winger."
     "They were upset that Olbermann didn't bother to challenge her," one GE shareholder said.
     Immelt said he takes a hands-off approach to what is reported on the company's news networks, which prompted a shareholder to criticize him for not managing NBC Uni effectively.
     "My biggest surprise was the open hostility to MSNBC," another shareholder said. "It was noticeable and loud. I don't remember any of this going on last year."
     One shareholder at the Orlando, Fla., meeting was Jesse Watters, a producer of "The O'Reilly Factor." Watters asked a question at the meeting, then turned on the Fox News Channel cameras outside the venue and interviewed other shareholders who attended the meeting.

     Watters, of course, is the O'Reilly go-fer who specializes in ambush interviews. Last month, Watters stalked and ambushed ThinkProgress Managing Editor Amanda Terkel, who was at least the fortieth victim of the FOX tool's tactics. 

     You can expect O'Reilly to mine every second of (heavily-edited) tape in his never-ending jihad against the mythical "secular-progressives" in the "mainstream media," which is really just Bill-O-speak for "MSNBC."