Goodbye, Keith

Keith Olbermann left MSNBC last Friday. Apparently, his contract was up and MSNBC chose to not renew it. Does that mean he was fired? I'm not so sure that it does, even though so many media reports say that he was fired (but that's probably because the media sucks and not because it's true). Whatever the reason, he's gone and people are acting like it's a big deal. I'm here to tell you that it's not a big deal.

Do you know how many people watch cable news? You'd think, judging from the way everyone always seems to be going on and on about it, that it was dang near everyone. Yeah, it's not even close to everyone. In fact, it's closer to no one than it is closer to everyone. And MSNBC is no exception. For the week that Olbermann's stint with MSNBC ended, do you know where MSNBC fell in the ratings during prime time? If you guessed anything in single digits, you'd be wrong. No, those spots were taken up by stations like USA, TNT, MTV and Nick at freaking Nite. (I was paraphrasing on that last one there, of course.) According to Media Bistro, MSNBC came in 25th last week. The chart is a little hard to read (is 'Microscopic' a new font?), but it looks like prime time viewership on MSNBC averaged somewhere between 690,000 and 838,000 people. That's nothing. NOTHING. Nick at Nite's prime time viewership is practically double those numbers. But no one is talking about what Spongebob is up to, are they?! (I'm really not even sure what that means.)

You'd never guess that from all that you've heard across the Interwebs, would you? You'd have thought that Olbermann was some sort of liberal god who preached nightly to his masses of devoted followers. But no. In essence, he was spouting off his lopsided rants to an audience that was somewhere around the same number as the population of Baltimore. Big whoop. And now there's talk about him wanting to run for Congress or the Senate or something like that. (I'll support that endeavor only if he can take Al Franken's place. I'm not a fan.) Are you kidding me? I mean, if he wants to run, that's his deal. But I hope he isn't surprised if a whole lot of people have no idea who he is. Ooh! Maybe if he does decide to run for office that will mean that he'll be off the air longer! Run! Run! Run! But in the meantime, I've heard that if he needs a job, the photo below gives an inkling of who might hire him for what.