MSNBC Gaining on Fox

Fox News is still the preferred network for most of America, but don’t count out dark horse MSNBC sneaking up on the title. The liberal-leaning cable network grabbed more primetime viewers than CNN this March, outranking the network for the first time ever. Meanwhile, Fox widened its lead off the strength of Bill O’Reilly, who has about 3.4 million viewers a night, making his show the most popular on cable news. At CNN, Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper lost about 9 percent of their audience, while Larry King’s audience went up about 9 percent. Maybe this is a sign that the public wants to listen to what they already know: CNN is nonpartisan during primetime, while gainers Fox and MSNBC, with Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, are decidedly not.