And here I thought it was just my satellite dish gone flaky (otherwise I would have blogged it Friday). It wasn’t.

Cable News Ratings for June 29, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 858,000 viewers
CNN – 515,000 viewers
MSNBC – 267,000 viewers
CNBC – 172,000 viewers
HLN – 251,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,374,000 viewers
CNN – 931,000 viewers
MSNBC – 504,000 viewers
CNBC –202,000 viewers
HLN – 454,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 237,000 viewers
CNN –164,000 viewers
MSNBC – 109,000 viewers
CNBC – 59,000 viewers
HLN – 101,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 302,000 viewers
CNN – 255,000 viewers
MSNBC – 230,000 viewers
CNBC –58,000 viewers
HLN – 167,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 999,000 viewers (374,000)
American Morning – 470,000 viewers (186,000)
MSNBC Live (7-9 AM) – 155,000 viewers (31,000)
Robin & Co. –217,000 viewers (84,000)
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Having Al Sharpton guest host live on Hardball when Breaking News happens. Setting aside for the moment the fact that MSNBC picked a liberal activist to guest host that program, I don’t know how Sharpton managed to restrain himself and play it straight when the news broke that President Bush had commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence. His lips must be made of stainless steel. It was actually kind of thrilling watching the show at that point because I kept waiting for him to blow up but as far as I know he never did. Apparently that happened the next hour during Tucker when David Shuster was commenting (though I never saw it happen, that’s the impression I got when Pat Buchannan was referring to Shuster later on)

FNC (The Big Story with John Gibson) and MSNBC broke the news almost simultaneously at 5:45 pm ET. CNN came in last 2 minutes later with Suzanne Malveaux in The Situation Room reporting an AP wire story.

CNN’s release on its website relaunch…

Reaffirming its position as the leading Internet site for news and information, CNN.com unveiled on Sunday, July 1, the latest evolution in online news: an intuitive, integrated Web site that puts users within a click of the global, national and local news and information they find most relevant to them.

With the site’s enhancements and redesign, users can access the news of the day through a story package that provides text, images, video, related stories and user-generated content. Also, the live online video content that was available through the subscription-only CNN Pipeline becomes woven into the fabric of CNN.com. All CNN.com video, live and on-demand is available to users for free, making the site’s news video offering the most extensive on the Web.

“To simply describe this relaunch as a site redesign grossly understates what we’re doing at CNN.com,” said Susan Grant, executive vice president of CNN News Services. “This goes beyond the next level of online news and jumps straight into a fully integrated experience in which articles, videos, images and user-generated content all come together to give users a more enriching, immediate interaction with the news content and information they need and want.”

The goal of CNN.com’s latest evolution is to enhance and simplify online news for consumers to allow them to access and interact with their information in more ways than ever before. To that end, improvements to CNN.com and its international edition include:
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CNBC put out a release on the next episode of its “American Greed” series…

CNBC’s “American Greed,” an original primetime series, uncovers one of the largest art thefts in the United States in its next episode to air July 5th at 9 PM ET.

Former co-workers, Donald Rasch and Biron Valier conspired to steal more than 130 pieces of fine art worth more than $4 million dollars from Fine Arts Express, a poorly-run art storage facility in the St. Louis area. Rasch tells all to “American Greed.” The FBI’s Art Crime Team has tracked the stolen art to museums, art galleries and private collections across the country and even around the world, and to date, has recovered more than 100 pieces making it their largest art recovery.

Still, many pieces remain missing.
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Variety’s Michael Learmonth writes about MSNBC carrying two Florida debates in January 2008…

The Republican and Democratic debates, scheduled for Jan. 23 and 25, will air locally on NBC stations in Florida and nationally on MSNBC.

Debates come the day after New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 22 and a week before the Florida primary, which was moved up to Jan. 29 from early March in a bid to give Florida voters more clout in the electoral process.

South Carolina is also holding a primary on Jan. 29, followed by 24 more states a week later.

The debate is co-sponsored by NBC, Leadership Florida, the Florida Press Assn. and Florida Public Broadcasting Service.

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz profiles MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough…

At a horseshoe-shaped desk in an aircraft hangar of a studio, Joe Scarborough jokes with his sidekicks during the commercial breaks, and when the red light comes on, keeps chatting without so much as a “welcome back.”

During a three-hour MSNBC morning show, the former Florida congressman says he hails from the “Redneck Riviera,” mutters about “stupid Chinese” after news of a recall of tires made in their country, declares that “I want to get the hell out of Iraq” and says, “I would be drooling over myself” if the surviving Beatles appeared on the program.

MSNBC executives have decided that Scarborough is the next Don Imus — not that anyone could replace Imus — and are finalizing the details for “Morning Joe” to permanently take over the 6-to-9 morning slot. The network this week is removing the “Scarborough Country” name from his old 9 p.m. program, now being hosted by MSNBC’s general manager, Dan Abrams. And CBS Radio, which syndicated Imus until his April firing, is negotiating whether some of its stations will carry the “Joe” show, as well.

The Observer’s Paul Harris has an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski about Paris Hilton…

Mika Brzezinski’s Blackberry is currently receiving new messages at the rate of about one a minute. Some come from friends and colleagues, but most are from complete strangers. To nearly all, she is a heroine.

‘I had one woman send me an email and she told me was weeping tears of joy that someone finally took a stand,’ the American TV news anchor says. Brzezinski’s achievement was to raise a defiant fist in the face of one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: celebrity. Working for US cable news channel MSNBC, Brzezinski decided last week to refuse to read a news story about Paris Hilton.

To the amazement of viewers of the news show Morning Joe, she simply looked into the camera and apologised for the decision to put the hotel heiress’s release from jail at the top of news, ahead of an important political story linked to the war in Iraq. ‘I didn’t choose it,’ she said of the Hilton story. When her co-host, Joe Scarborough laughed at her words, she simply refused to read the story. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I hate this story and I don’t think it should be the lead.’ Then she put the Hilton story down and began to read the rest of the script, opening with the phrase ‘To the news now…’