Rachel Maddow is Whipping Larry King's Behind, Prompts Attitude From CNN Producer

(Photo from Rob Bennett for The New York Times)

Oh yes, this is great news indeed. First, this great diary from Stu hunter over at the Kos:

In television, ratings are the bottom line, and Rachel Maddow has little to worry about these days. In the six weeks since Maddow took over the 9:00 p.m. hour on MSNBC, she's doubled the timeslot's audience.

"I'm pinching myself," Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, tells The New York Times.

More, from the NY Times about Rachel's success.

More important for her bosses at MSNBC is that “The Rachel Maddow Show,” her left-leaning news and commentary program, has averaged a higher rating among 25- to 54-year-olds than “Larry King Live” on CNN for 13 of the 25 nights she has been host. While the average total audience of her program remains slightly smaller than that of Mr. King’s, Ms. Maddow, 35, has made MSNBC competitive in that time slot for the first time in a decade. The channel at that hour has an average viewership of 1.7 million since she started on Sept. 8, compared with 800,000 before.

This success has gotten the Corporate News Network (neo-CNN) so tight, that they released this statement:

Ryan Jimenez, a spokesman for “Larry King Live,” said in a statement that the shows couldn’t be more different: “While our competitors have moved to partisan extremes, we continue landing the biggest guests because we embrace the vast middle and have a wider appeal,” he said.

A wide appeal, oh geez, not that "central, fake fair & balance" BS. As Mr.Moulitsas put it so eloquently:

And I love the Broderesque bull---- from the King spokesman, about the "vast middle". If it's so vast, why is the Larry King show being crushed in the ratings by Fox and Maddow's upstart show? Like I said, Dinosaur.

Dinosaur, nahhhhhh Markos. Caveman is more like it (and no Geico, that wasn't a call to hammer me now).