Maddow Is The New O'Reilly

With Bill O'Reilly out of the picture, Rachel Maddow has become the most-watched personality in primetime cable news, but she's done it without me. I used to tune into her on occasion, but I always felt like I'd stumbled into a college course where the professor was going into deep analysis of something obscure that I should have gathered background information on, but since I hadn't done any of the assigned reading, I was simply sitting through a lecture that didn't address my need to have the biggest news stories of the day explained in terms I can understand.

So, I don't watch Maddow. But then, I don't watch any of her MSNBC colleagues or her FNC or CNN competitors, either. For that matter, I consume very little TV news, other than the "your world in ninety seconds" montage that Charlie Rose introduces at the top of "CBS This Morning."

That said, I'm glad that MSNBC is beating Fox News Channel in primetime because it means that more people are getting a center-left perspective on what's going on. Or at least what's going on according to cable news, which is not the same thing as what's really going on.