Jane Velez-Mitchell‘s HLN show, which airs at 7 p.m., ended an era Friday night, as it was the last time “Issues” was used in the title. Starting Monday, it will simply be known as Jane Velez-Mitchell. On her final night with “Issues,” Velez-Mitchell pulled in 74,000 viewers in the 25-54 year-old demo, and 272,000 overall. [...]

HLN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell is dropping the Issues from the title of her 7pm EST news program airing weeknights.

In a contentious interview, HLN’s Nancy Grace cut off the mic of Joran van der Sloot friend John Ludwick after he blamed Sloot’s victim for her murder. “You are saying that the murder victim who endured a brutal beating a super human strangulation where her neck bone was crushed, the room covered in blood, her clothes ripped off of her post mortem and left that way to be found, it’s her fault?!” Grace exclaimed incredulously.

Nancy Grace was in a particularly spirited Casey Anthony tizzy during her show last night on HLN, after passionately disputing that new “Tot Mom” videos were leaked to the internet as a result of hacking. “Whoa stop, Trisha! You just hurt my ear! That’s what her lawyer said!?” Grace exclaimed. “Her lawyers also said George Anthony molested her and Lee Anthony molested her. Remember that!? They also said the baby died in the swimming pool and that george anthony, a former cop, went and threw the body in a pet cemetery out in the woods to decompose. Yeah, they said that too. So what do I care what they said? Why are you telling me that?”

It’s time to take another compelling journey into the realm of year-end cable news ratings through the oh-so-rosy lens of the network’s publicists. What can you expect? Cleverly-crafted bullet points from the MSNBC, CNN, HLN, and imaginary* Fox News number-crunchers, all doing their best to somehow make Nielsen’s year-end ratings look as if, yes, everybody won!

Friday nights are, as we’ve noted before, incredibly weird. But, on the day after a big debate, with people nursing GOP hangovers and the political scene otherwise quiet and essentially shut down for the holidays, its doubly weird. Mix in the fact that the weekend before both Christmas and Hanukkah is likely full of parties, shopping, and other distractions pulling us away from our beloved cable news shows, and things get even shakier. So it’s wise to take these exceptionally-low numbers — it cannot be stressed enough — with a grain of salt.

Fox News was almost universally lauded for their production of the Republican debate on Thursday night, and the amount of people who tuned in made it doubly enjoyable for the cable news network: 6.7 million viewers tuned in to watch the debate, with 1.9 million of them coming from the 25-54 year old demo. The only debate this year to beat these numbers was ABC’s last week, which pulled 7.6 million overall and 2.1 million in the demo. Keep in mind that ABC is in about 17 million more homes than Fox News.

Joy Behar‘s show on HLN drew to a close on Thursday night after having been unceremoniously canceled just two years after making its debut. HLN will show re-runs of her old episodes, and, in January, will fill the slot with a re-air of Nancy Grace’s broadcast from earlier in the evening.

On Thursday night, Shepard Smith took third place overall (behind Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity) in the 25-54 year-old demo ratings. On Friday night, Bret Baier surged to third. On Monday, it was The Five. Tuesday night? Greta Van Susteren drew 406,000 viewers and landed in third place overall for the night.

Perhaps it was a boost from Saturday Night Live lampooning his show and curiosity-seekers tuning in to see what it was all about — or maybe it was simply just his turn to rise up in the ratings — but Al Sharpton tied for MSNBC’s ratings lead on Monday night in the 25-54 year old [...]

Now that Joy Behar is poised to wrap up her HLN show, it’s a good a time as any to sit down and confess some of the sins she’s committed during her time as host. Seated in a confessional with Anderson Cooper Father Edward Beck, Behar confessed that she’d lied about her HLN colleague Nancy [...]

Friday nights are always a little screwy in the ratings world, with MSNBC trotting out specials at 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., and some hosts opting to cede their spot behind the desk to a guest anchor. On top of all that, it’s Friday. People go out, see movies, do stuff that tends to be a little more fun than sitting at home, watching a cable news repeat. In other words, take the Friday ratings with a much larger grain of salt than you normally would on any other night.

It’s no secret that ratings are a fickle beast. One night, you’re toasting with friends about the 230,000 viewers in the 25 to 54 demo who tuned in to see your interview with, say, Hulk Hogan‘s ex-wife; the next, you hang your head low at the 124,000 who wanted to see you talk with some foreign head of state. These numbers, in short, make little sense. And that’s what makes it fun — the random aberrations that occur every night.

New OWN host Rosie O’Donnell appeared on Joy Behar‘s HLN show, in part to talk a little smack about the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls.

After describing Trump as being “like Lord Voldemort” and performing an impression of the reality TV star for Behar, O’Donnell shared that he was the “perfect” person to moderate a GOP debate. “I don’t even believe it’s real anymore!”

Even with the volatility of the numbers, there are always certain sureties every night in the ratings: Bill O’Reilly will win the night, Fox News will have seven of the top seven shows, and Rachel Maddow will usually be in the top three of the non-FNC shows. On Tuesday night, O’Reilly captured 742,000 viewers in [...]

For the last few years, there’s been a great hullabaloo made over the “War on Christmas” — basically, the belief that companies, networks, and other public entities have phased out “Christmas” and replaced it with “holidays.” Fox News — led in the movement by Bill O’Reilly — has been a leader in the resistance of the movement, but we wanted to see if there were any other networks keeping “Christmas” in the lexicon, possibly in a more understated manner.

Piers Morgan — to editorialize for just a moment — is one of our favorite cable news hosts. Maybe it’s the British accent; perhaps its our affinity for Celebrity Apprentice winners. But he hasn’t really, as Brian Stetler of the New York Times noted Thursday, caught on yet in the ratings.

There are a handful shows on cable news during prime time that broadcast once, and then pop up again a couple hours later as a re-air. They’re not always true repeats–in some cases, the entire production crew is still in the control room making sure everything runs smoothly. But there’s a strange phenomenon with the ratings of these shows: sometimes the re-air will actually out-rate the original broadcast. On Wednesday night, this happened with four of the five shows that regularly show up twice: AC360 (better in the 25-54 demo at 10 p.m. than 8 p.m.), The Ed Show (11 p.m. better than 8 p.m.), OutFront (11 p.m. better than 7 p.m.), and Hardball (7 p.m. bests the 5 p.m.). The only re-air to not beat its original broadcast? The O’Reilly Factor, which leads the night in ratings on a regular basis with its 8 p.m. first run.

It’s time to take another compelling journey into the realm of monthly cable news ratings through the oh-so-rosy lens of the network’s publicists. What can you expect? Cleverly-crafted bullet points from the MSNBC, CNN, and imaginary* Fox News number-crunchers, all doing their best to somehow make Nielsen’s month-end ratings look as if, yes, everybody won!

Ann Coulter made a rare appearance on MSNBC today, and, well, the insults were rolling fast and loose, and not escaping the censors. Coulter visited Joy Behar tonight to review her experience there and clarify what exactly she called Sen. John McCain that merited bleeping: “I said ‘dickweed,’ I thought you could say that!”

The good news: CNN’s Tuesday night debate numbers gave the network a clear-cut win over Fox News in both total viewers and among viewers aged 25-54 in the 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. slots. Additionally, Anderson Cooper got a huge boost from the debate as his lead-in, attracting 405,000 demo viewers and toppling FNC’s Greta Van Susteren at 10:00.

You may recall that, last week, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly took on HLN’s Joy Behar for having enabled her guest, actress Ellen Barkin, to have shared false information about terrible things O’Reilly had supposedly said about her on his show.

Last night, O’Reilly invited Fox News contributor Bernie Goldberg to discuss who, exactly, should be held responsible when guests lie on television.

On Monday night, Joy Behar started a panel discussion on her show about a parent who complained when a Hooters waitress in Florida was invited to talk to a group of high school and middle school students for a career day. Behar erroneously told the panel that the waitress spoke at a special needs elementary school, then quickly brought up the earlier case of porn star Sasha Grey reading to schoolchildren last week.

Fox News routinely wins the cable news prime time ratings, and MSNBC has a string of second-place finishes under its belt, but it’s rare to get a night with both channels snagging all of the first and second-place finishes in the 25-54 year-old demo. That was the case Friday night, as the networks ran the [...]

Late Wednesday night, Deadline broke news that Joy Behar would be leaving her show on HLN at the end of the year. And boy, did it do wonders for her ratings. Behar attracted 198,000 viewers in the 25-54 year-old demo. The show still finished fourth, but it was a marked jump from her previous numbers [...]