Rachel Maddow Beats CNN And Fox In Ratings per NYT - Rachel is a hero for beating out Fox!

[flamingdem]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/3/13/1642926/-Rachel-Maddow-Beats-CNN-And-Fox-In-Ratings-Symbolizing-Left-Leaning-Rise-Generally-Per-NYT

The New York Times reports turbo-charged ratings, on “left-leaning” shows, specifically Rachel Maddow's show, which beat both CNN and number one rated Fox News in the last ratings sweep. Maddow's ratings now are the highest in the nine year history of her show. These ratings come as a complete surprise to television executives who expected the usual ratings drop-off after the election, but who have, to their delight, seen quite another viewing phenomenon take hold.

Left-leaning MSNBC, after flailing at the end of the Obama years, has edged CNN in prime time. Stephen Colbert’s openly anti-Trump “Late Show” is beating Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight” for the first time. Bill Maher’s HBO flock has grown nearly 50 percent since last year’s presidential primaries, and “The Daily Show” has registered its best ratings since Jon Stewart left in 2015.

"There's definitely a sense of we're-in-this-together-ness," Trevor Noah said in an interview, noting that Mr. Trump's election had infused his show with a new sense of purpose. "People are finding a space here in saying, 'Oh, I'm not crazy -- somebody else is also outraged by this,'" Noah said. “We are in the same position as a lot of our audience is in,” he said. “We felt the change and we felt an immediate shift, and we responded accordingly.”

Maddow sees her ratings victory as part of a larger awakening in our culture, which is devoutly to be wished:

“There is this surge in civic interest and engagement,” Ms. Maddow said as she sprawled in a chair in her cluttered Rockefeller Plaza office, where the tip of an Emmy Award poked out of a metal beer pail. “It feels like a spontaneous, organic, pretty broad-based, heterogeneous, energized, constructive force, and it’s been interesting to me to see it happen everywhere.”

Is it safe to assume that rattled liberals have finally found a safe space, a perch in which to light for at least a time, while licking our wounds and shaking our traumatized heads? It would seem that the right wing isn't going away, but that at least, thankfully, the left is apparently pulling in some viewers that it didn't have before and viewing habits are definitely changing, in all events:

Viewing habits seem to reflect the increasingly polarized state of the nation. Cable news, with its sharp punditry, is seeing huge ratings, but viewership for the strait-laced network evening newscasts is falling, along with that of general-interest morning shows. CNN, once the buttoned-up straight man of cable news, has embraced its role as foil to Mr. Trump, with anchors like Jake Tapper delivering aggressive interviews and commentary on the administration.

Just as radio was the mass medium around which people gathered back in WWII to hear FDR’s fireside chats, today television is the medium that Americans are turning to en masse in these uncertain times. “It is a place where we congregate,” said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center for media and society at the University of Southern California. “We all gather around that hearth to know what’s going on out there, and be comforted by the people who come on our screens to say, things will be all right.”

Things are looking up and this is the catharsis and comfort that we need.

[trueblue2007]

1. i love rachel

[uponit7771]

2. +1