Yeah, I know...I almost want to claw my eyes out just typing that sentence. But after watching Countdown tonight, as I've done religiously almost every night for the last four years or so, I think the great gelatinous mass at the core of what's left of the Party of No-No may actually have more of a point than Keith Olbermann would like to acknowledge.
See, here's the thing: I understand the challenges in filling an hour of high-profile national television night after night, now that the most dramatic election campaign in recent years is fading into distant memory and especially now that our guy won.
Anyone who's worked in commercial TV news, as I used to, knows that you need more than just, you know, "news" to make an interesting hour of TV. You need a storyline, and you need something or someone to rail against, and absent the easy target of W in the Oval Office, you take what you can get.
But maybe...just maybe...the jiggling mass that long ago ate Rush Limbaugh had a good idea when he suggested that MSNBC try going 30 days without talking about him or showing video of him.
Yeah, I know...but humor me over the jump with some ratings statistics and a humble suggestion for the future of Countdown, won't you?
OK...first some numbers. One of the first stops everyone in the business makes each morning is the website TVNewser.com, where they post the cable news ratings from the previous night.
On Tuesday night, for instance, in the "coveted 25-54 demographic" that ad agencies supposedly use to decide where to spend their money, here's what those numbers looked like:
8 PM
O'Reilly 686,000
Olbermann 258,000
9 PM
Hannity 502,000
Maddow 212,000
These numbers are very volatile. It's not unusual to see a swing of as many as 200,000 viewers from night to night. They don't count out-of-home viewing, so if you're watching Keith http://www.dailykos.com/... a dorm room or Rachel in a hotel bar, that doesn't count. (But neither do the people watching Bill'O at the gym, or Hannity in a hotel room.)
It's hard to get a really fair year-to-year comparison, especially since May 2008 was still in the midst of primary season, and a year ago Tuesday was a primary night. So let's look at the following Tuesday, May 27, 2008:
8 PM
O'Reilly 562,000
Olbermann 437,000
9 PM
Hannity 484,000
Abrams 272,000
(and yes, TVNewser had a typo in the date on this 2008 post, I know.)
Notice anything here? While the Fox audience has remained fairly stable from year to year, as one might expect, MSNBC's audience isn't holding up as steadily. To be fair, this has been a particularly weak week for MSNBC's numbers, for some reason, and there have been some days that are better than this. (The same is true for Fox.)
The comparison would be even more dramatic if I used numbers from right around the election, when MSNBC's numbers shot up and even exceeded Fox's on some nights. So what the heck is going on here? A few thoughts:
1. We won! Elections have consequences, of course...and one of them is that those of us over here on the left, free of the nail-biting pre-election angst that had us tuning into MSNBC in droves, can now relax a bit - and are therefore not watching Keith and Rachel as religiously as we did last fall. (I bet pageviews are way down over at 538.com, too...)
2. They need Fox more than we need MSNBC. I mean, who'd tell what's left of the GOP what to think if they didn't have Bill and Sean to give the nightly marching orders, right? Sure, I jest, a bit...but the fact is that O'Reilly and Hannity and, yes, Rush play a much more central role in forming the ideology of the party than Keith and Rachel do (or should) on our side. The result, I think, is a more reliable base for Fox each night than for MSNBC. (TVNewser.com also prints the total audience, age 12+, and from that we learn that there are about a million viewers over the age of 55 who tune in night after night after night to O'Reilly.) They have to watch; we have plenty of other choices if we don't care for Keith's lineup.
3. Watching a party self-destruct gets boring after a while. Sure, it's fun to toy with the Goposaur and to see how many different positions Michael Steele can find to jam his foot into his mouth...but we call ourselves progressives because what we really seek is "progress."
And, dammit, Keith, I love you...but devoting half the show every night to the latest inane thing that BillO or Hannity or Beck or Rush has bloviated about has ceased to be all that much fun. We know they lie. We know their logic is riddled with inconsistencies. We know they're all full of hot air.
Sir, if I may speak for my fellow Kossacks - and I know that's a dangerous bit of hubris - we don't tune in to Countdown because we expect to be surprised in any way by the latest rantings of the Limbaugh/Beck/Hannity/Savage wing. Nor do we tune in because we care deeply about the latest twist in your personal feuds with any of those blowhards.
No, we tune in to you (and to Rachel, and to Ed, and even Matthews) because we want a take on the news of the day that's opinionated in a direction other than that of Fox News. We want to hear from voices Fox News won't put on the air. We want you to challenge the powerful - yes, even if those in power are in our party. We want, in short, not to hear the nonstop reprise of Fox News-this and Rush Limbaugh-that.
Those of us who are long-time "Countdown" viewers know that the show has changed direction in the past as the world around it has changed. I remember the nightly "stories my producers are making me do" roundups of celebrity fluff, and the weekly American Idol recaps (why?), and the days when "Countdown" had at least one field reporter (remember Monica Novotny?) out covering a story about something other than politics.
It's starting to feel like the show is stalled on January 19, 2009, unable to move forward into a post-Bush era and mired in a constant funk of "WTF?!"
Is it possible that Rush Limbaugh, whatever he may have meant by his proposal for a moratorium on his MSNBC appearances, might actually have been on to something?
What, sir, would your show look like if it didn't have the easy crutch of "look what dumb thing Rush did today" to fall back on?
Maybe, just maybe, it's time to find out?