In recent months, bad news in the financial world has translated into big news for CNBC, and big news is good news for a 24-hour cable news network. With national interest in financial news at a fever pitch, the business news network has been posting its highest ratings in its 19-year history.

And now, owner GE is rewarding them with … budget cuts!

Bosses at CNBC, The Observer has learned, are now preparing to scale back budgets. Sources inside CNBC have heard that the figure could approach a 10 percent overall budget cut.

“We’re committed to having the best team in business news worldwide,” said CNBC spokesman Kevin Goldman.  read more »

MSNBC President Phil Griffin announced today that the cable news channel has extended Keith Olbermann's contract through 2012.

In February of last year, MSNBC and Mr. Olbermann reached an agreement that would keep the Countdown host under contract through 2011.

The new agreement would seem to extend Mr. Olbermann's commitment to MSNBC through the 2012 presidential election.

"Keith Olbermann is at the core of MSNBC's current success," said Mr. Griffin in a press release today. "'Countdown' is our signature program and I'm thrilled that we're going to be able to bring it to Keith's loyal viewers for another four year term."

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On Thursday, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow appeared on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, where she discussed such things as the new king of Bhutan and her lack of Peabody Awards.

"Just for the record, how many Peabody's do you have?" Mr. Colbert asked her at the outset. "I don't have any Peabodys," Ms. Maddow answered.

"I've got a couple," Mr. Colbert boasted before suggesting that she, like Bill O'Reilly, just claim she has some. "Nobody checks," he assured her.

On Tuesday night, some 71.5 million viewers tuned in across 14 television networks to watch Senator Barack Obama's victory over Senator John McCain, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Overall it was the highest rated election night since 1980.

On broadcast television, ABC News was big winner. On cable, CNN dominated.

The Nielsen numbers for total viewers via THR:

ABC: 13,135,000

NBC: 12,018,000

CBS: 7,829,000

Fox: 5,137,000

CNN: 12,304,000

Fox News: 9,044,000

MSNBC: 5,889,000

It was Tuesday afternoon around 2:30 p.m., and Chris Matthews had been up since early in the morning, working the phones, jotting down notes, marveling at American democracy and the turnout in North Carolina, thinking about Roosevelt, and Truman, and J.F.K. In a few short hours, he would be on the air at MSNBC, guiding viewers through the returns.

Already, his mind was racing.

"If Obama wins it will be a time when the world once again looks at us with wonder," Mr. Matthews told The Observer.

"The great thing about America is that people have always looked at this country and said, How do they do it?" said Mr.  read more »

Who says liberals and leftists can't get airtime on FOX News? The Huffington Post has video of an important Election Alert from Ruper Murdoch's the "fair and balanced" news network that features William Ayers—the man whom Senator John McCain referred to in the third debate as "an old washed-up terrorist"—voting in Chicago.

Here's Megyn Kelly's artful segue into the segment:

'Well, I'll tell ya what: From Bill Clinton to a very different kind of Barack Obama supporter, and that is William Ayers, who showed up and got caught on camera going into the voting station today.

Ms. Kelly closed the segment by once again drawing a line "from Bill Clinton to Bill Ayers.  read more »

The Web is revving its engine for tomorrow's big night. Here's where you can tune in on your computer and your iPhone:

ABC News is offering live streams of its own TV broadcast and they'll have Web cams at the McCain and Obama campaign headquarters. CBS News will be offering county-by-county, up-to-the-minute results with live blogging, and a simulcast of its TV coverage, starting at 6:30 p.m. Around 2 a.m, Katie Couric will live chat with viewers on CBSNews.com and CNET.com. MSNBC has a neat results widget, which posts real-time results to your blog or Facebook profile. CNN YourRaces allows you to customize your own tracking tool (with local races too), and then watch the results in real time through CNN's site or on your  read more »

On Monday, October 27th, Bill Wolff, the executive producer of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, got an email from the show's booker Andy Dallos. Mr. Dallos had some good news: Senator Barack Obama wanted to sit down with Ms. Maddow for an interview on Thursday afternoon in Florida.

"I was like, woooh-hooo!" said Mr. Wolff.  read more »

Multichannel News' Todd Spangler reports that MSNBC will go HD in the second quarter of 2009.

"Look, I’d love to be in HD right now," said network president Phil Griffin according to Mr. Spangler. "The idea of the announcement before the election appealed to me. I pushed our guys hard... We don't want to do it in parts. We want to be fully ready." (This comes via Michael Calderone at Politico.)

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.

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