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The New York Observer

Rachel Maddow's Ratings Have Taken Off Fast

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October 21, 2008 | 1:23 p.m
Maddow<br /> (screencap via msnbc.msn.com)
Maddow
screencap via msnbc.msn.com

Back in August, when we were riding around Denver in the back of a stretch Escalade with Rachel Maddow (and Pat Buchanan!), we wondered how long it would take for cable news audiences to warm up to Ms. Maddow's show, which, at the time, was set to debut on MSNBC in a few short weeks.

Today, in The New York Times, Brian Stelter provides the answer. As it turns out: not long!

From the article:

Rachel Maddow, a woman who does not own a television set, has done something that is virtually unheard of: she has doubled the audience for a cable news channel's 9 p.m. hour in a matter of days.

More important for her bosses at MSNBC is that "The Rachel Maddow Show," her left-leaning news and commentary program, has averaged a higher rating among 25- to 54-year-olds than "Larry King Live" on CNN for 13 of the 25 nights she has been host. While the average total audience of her program remains slightly smaller than that of Mr. King's, Ms. Maddow, 35, has made MSNBC competitive in that time slot for the first time in a decade. The channel at that hour has an average viewership of 1.7 million since she started on Sept. 8, compared with 800,000 before.

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