Over Time with Bill Maher, February 10, 2017

Bill and his Real Time panelists –  John Waters, Karine Jean-Pierre, Piers Morgan and Jim Jefferies – answer viewer questions after the show.

CNN Cancels Piers Morgan

Taran Killam will have to find a new news guy to mock
on SNL. Image from source, Raw Story.

While FOX "News" (and their fans) often point and laugh at MSNBC's ratings, the truth is, CNN would kill for even MSNBC's audience. Barring a huge news event--and those still tend to reflexively bring viewers to the channel--CNN is barely breathing, ratings-wise. CNN's own HLN (the horrible devolution of CNN Headline News, which was great) is the only major cable news channel with worse ratings.

So, while it's not a surprise that CNN needs to make changes, it's hard to figure out how they'd know where to start. I guess it's Piers Morgan being scapegoated first. Surely they wouldn't dump Anderson Cooper first. But they've got to do something.

Still, it's worth keeping in mind that cable news as a whole has a tiny, tiny audience. I watch The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC's top-rated program. But she manages only around a million viewers per program. And don't laugh too hard, FOX fans. Maddow's competition usually only gets about double her ratings, so it's not like it's any great shakes either.

[Excerpt]

CNN axing Piers Morgan’s show because of sagging ratings
 
CNN host Piers Morgan, the former British tabloid editor turned primetime successor to Larry King, will leave his show according to reports in the New York Times and POLITICO. Morgan has languished in the ratings, but achieved notoriety for his gun control advocacy in the wake of the Newtown shootings. Morgan’s show registered as few as 50,000 viewers in the 25-to-54 year-old demographic earlier this week, POLITICO noted. . .

Read more at: Raw Story

Alex Jones, Delusional Gun Fetishist

As I've said numerous times here, though I'm a liberal, I've never been in league with "gun grabbers." Of course, the more I see of the nutty people on the gun rights side of the issue, the more I'm waffling on that. And the more evident it is that the term gun grabbers is just a paranoid overstatement in the first place. Attention gun enthusiasts: some of these people are wacko. They are not just failing to win converts to your side, they are doing real damage to it. Por ejemplo:

[Excerpt]

Alex Jones's Insane Post-Piers Morgan Selfie Videos


After Alex Jones went on Piers Morgan Tonight on Monday, he retreated to his New York hotel room and made some videos for his YouTube channel accusing Mayor Michael Bloomberg of "stalking" him and sending crackheads after him.

“If something happens to us, or we’re killed by crackheads, it was the NYPD or mafia [Bloomberg] hired,” Jones said during the 12-minute monologue. . .

Read more at: BuzzFeed