From this evening’s Hardball where dueling MSNBC logos battled it out in the lower right corner of the screen for several minutes. You’d have thought MSNBC would have purged their old logo from their graphical assets when they made the switch to the new one. Apparently not. Which reminds me, when are they going to redo Countdown’s open? The open that uses the old logo?

TVNewser has some “clarification” on CNN’s 18-34 Demo claim. CNN is saying that was referring to “Primary Debates” and not General Election debates. Ok. Fair enough. That’s true. But isn’t that something that should have been spelled out in the original release?

Cable News Daily Ratings for July 24, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 823,000 viewers
CNN – 469,000 viewers
MSNBC – 271,000 viewers
CNBC – 193,000 viewers
HLN – 224,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,638,000 viewers
CNN – 778,000 viewers
MSNBC – 503,000 viewers
CNBC – 141,000 viewers
HLN – 419,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 239,000 viewers
CNN –155,000 viewers
MSNBC – 117,000 viewers
CNBC – 58,000 viewers
HLN – 94,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 423,000 viewers
CNN – 281,000 viewers
MSNBC – 203,000 viewers
CNBC – 72,000 viewers
HLN – 170,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 689,000 viewers (233,000)
American Morning – 443,000 viewers (126,000)
MSNBC Live (7-9am) – 245,000 viewers (71,000)
Robin & Co. – 186,000 viewers (125,000)
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MSNBC announced that Chris Matthews will co-moderate a two day Presidential Forum on Cancer at the end of August.

The first thought that popped into my head when I read this was how did MSNBC muzzle in on what had been CNN and Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s territory? At times it has seemed like whenever Lance was doing something, Gupta or CNN were there. Gupta even serves on Armstrong’s Foundation Board. How did CNN get frozen out of this by MSNBC? Or was the YouTube debate the big debate thing for the network for the next couple of months and they didn’t want another so soon?

Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s election anchor and host of “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” will serve as co-moderator along with seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong for the first-ever Livestrong® Presidential Cancer Forum. Presidential hopefuls from both parties will gather in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on August 27 and 28 to discuss how best to fight cancer. The Democratic forum will be held on Monday, August 27 and the Republican forum on August 28. Both forums will be held in the U.S. Cellular Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. (ET).

Viewers can submit questions prior to the forum in one of several ways: by sending their own videos to www.hardball.msnbc.com, by sending a question to the Lance Armstrong Foundation at www.Livestrong.org, and by sending a question to MSNBC.com’s politics page, http://politics.msnbc.com, where viewers will also be able to watch live video streams of the two-day forum. MSNBC.com’s interactive features also allow viewers to learn more about where candidates stand on important issues, vote on the candidates’ performances, and post their thoughts on the message boards.
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This morning I took issue with CNN using an obscure demographic, the 18-34, as the center piece of a ratings success story, rather than the more widely used 25-54 or even 18-49 Demographics. CNN said it was the highest 18-34 Demo “in cable news history”. It turns out that is not the case…
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FNC was the first of the cable nets with news of the Dallas propane explosion and fire that shut down two freeways and prompted some evacuations. Local FOX affiliate KDFW was providing footage of the emergencyexplosion that turned into a 3-alarm fire).

Break in times (ET):

FNC - 10:43 am
CNN - 10:50 am
MSNBC - 11:07 am

UPDATE: An emailer says KDFW was a big help and played a large role in FNC’s coverage.

I’m not quite sure what FishbowlDC is implying here about Kiran Chetry. But it doesn’t look good to me…

In a must read, Eat The Press’ Rachel Sklar positively torches CNN and Jonathan Klein for the way it handled Paula’s departure…

Wow - is history repeating itself? Because it sure feels like the fall of 2005: Bright young star is built up at CNN as the next big thing, while older, established network stalwart, on the job in earnest since September 11, 2001, is shunted aside with ostentatious silence from the brass and hushed whispers from everyone else. Sound familiar? Today, it’s the story of Paula Zahn’s wholly unsurprising resignation from CNN amid the hoopla of Campbell Brown’s ascendancy — but it might as well be the tale of Aaron Brown being not-so-subtly shoved out in favor of Anderson Cooper just over a year and a half ago. What they both have in common: The utter lack of grace and class on the part of CNN, transparently elbowing yesterday’s stars out of the way for the newer, younger model.

You would think that CNN would have learned a thing or two after Aaron Brown’s embarrassing ouster — embarrassing for CNN, that is, given the classless , very public way the matter was handled. You’d think that they might have been reminded by Brown’s re-emergence after his gag-order contract with CNN had expired. You’d maybe even think that they’d operate with a little more discretion after the response to Jon Klein’s comments about replacing Soledad O’Brien with Kiran Chetry on “American Morning”: “She lights up the screen… One look at her tells you why she deserves the slot.”

The Boston Globe’s Joanna Weiss writes about the viewership of the debate…

Monday’s CNN/YouTube presidential debate drew press attention, online controversy, and feverish questions about the nature of democracy. It also drew a few more of those coveted young voters.

The emphasis is on “a few” because the ratings numbers were modest, by television standards. But CNN said its ballyhooed Democratic debate, held at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., drew 407,000 viewers in the coveted 18-to-34 demographic, compared with 368,000 for CNN’s traditional June debate in New Hampshire. The YouTube debate drew 2.6 million viewers overall, a decrease of 6 percent from CNN’s debate in June.

CNN is touting the numbers as a victory for youth participation. But the modest increase also shows that newfangled technology does not always translate from one medium to another. And it points out the difficulties in trying to corral YouTube’s freewheeling spirit into a far more strait-laced format.

The Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin…
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FishbowlDC has a CNN release touting a record ratings draw for the 18-34 Demo…

CNN continues the trend of record-breaking debates with Monday night’s CNN/YouTube Debate posting the highest P18-34 delivery in cable news history.

18-34 Demo? Where did that come from? I hadn’t even heard of an 18-34 Demo before reading this. 25-54? Yes. 18-49? Yes. But 18-34? No. (see UPDATE)

Speaking of 18-49, CNN was down 21% from the last Democratic debate in New Hampshire. I had decided not to relay that number yesterday when I brought out the comparison in P2+ and P25-54 with the last debate because I thought the 18-49 Demo was too restrictive and not worth noting.

But then I saw this 18-34 Demo and thought, ok, if CNN is going to spin 18-34 as some big victory then I’m going to point out that they were down in 18-49. I believe if CNN had been up in 18-49, they would have gone with that number instead of 18-34.

CNN/YouTube Debate - 663,000 18-49 Viewers
New Hampshire Debate - 836,000 18-49 Viewers

(numbers are Live)

UPDATE: After thinking about it for a while, I have to admit that yes I have indeed heard of the 18-34 Demo. But it’s so rarely mentioned in the press that you could be excused for not having heard of it.

John Roberts, circa the mid-80s judging from the Richard Marx hairstyle (via The Politico via Atrios)

The Washington Post’s Paul Fahri writes about how fresh your cable news is…

The dizzying world of news labels raises many questions. Is it possible for a “Developing Story” to become “Developed,” like a Polaroid picture or a post-adolescent woman? Does “Breaking News” ever become “Broken” (and if so, can it be “fixed”)?

And can a “Developing Story” ever morph into a “Breaking Story” and vice versa? Or are they like oil and water, matter and antimatter, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger?

Perhaps the biggest question is why the news needs such quickened-breath labels at all. Isn’t all news just, you know, new information? Jeremy Gaines, a spokesman for MSNBC, replies that the labels “telegraph the story in a visual way” for channel-surfing viewers.