Excerpted from Daily Finance: Is America Getting Over Keith Olbermann?, 01/29/10
There are creeping indications that the world may not have quite as much need of Keith Olbermann and his shtick as it once did.
Ratings for Olbermann’s Countdown have been soft recently. In the important demographic of adults 25 to 54 — the group advertisers are looking to reach — Countdown was down 44% year-over-year in January. It averaged 268,000 viewers in that demo. Fox News’s O’Reilly Factor dominated the hour with 964,000 viewers age 25 to 54, and was the only cable news show in the time period to increase its audience, by 55%.
But there are also more subjective signs that Olbermann’s stridency and lack of proportion are alienating some of his natural allies. Quite a few eyebrows elevated last week when Jon Stewart, in a parody of one of Olbermann’s “Special Comment” segments, called out the newsman for going way over the top in his denunciations of Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts.
MSNBC attributes Olbermann’s January ratings slip to a news cycle in which international news, rather than domestic politics, was the No. 1 story. “On big, breaking international news, CNN tends to do better than us. “We’re the place for politics, and there are times when politics does great, and there are times when it doesn’t. We’lI get our momentum back.”
The Homa Files 
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