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 [...]

While Fox News routinely finishes first in the ratings — with even their lowest-rated show beating the highest on any other station — Rachel Maddow‘s 329,000 viewers in the 25-54 year-old demo Wednesday night is still pretty impressive. It’s also the closest in recent memory to making a run at a Fox show on a [...]

Deadline.com is reporting tonight that Joy Behar will be leaving her HLN show, which she’s hosted since 2009, by the end of the year. Behar’s show is doing well for the network, second in ratings only to Nancy Grace‘s program.

There are beatdowns, and then there is what happened to HLN on Wednesday night. The network finished fourth in every time slot except for Nancy Grace‘s (at 8 p.m.) in the 25-54 year-old demo. Five of its seven prime time shows failed to attract 100,000 demo viewers; no other show on any network dipped below [...]

While Diane Sawyer‘s interview with Gabrielle Giffords was a ratings coup for her on Monday night, Bill O’Reilly found a secondary benefit: his interview with Sawyer attracted 725,000 viewers in the 25-54 year-old demo, the most of any show all night long. In fact, O’Reilly’s demo numbers were so large, if you combine all the demo viewers from the HLN slate, they still fall short of O’Reilly’s numbers by about 63,000.

Fox News’ The Five has shown some solid growth in their ratings since their debut, but they hadn’t yet been the highest-rated show on any channel in their demo. Until Friday night. Not only did they win the time slot for the 25-54 year-old demo, but they took down every other news show on cable in that universe. Granted, Laura Ingraham was subbing once again for Bill O’Reilly, but The Five still beat out every other show on their slate, all of which are normally very strong.

The roller coaster ride that is the “Erin Burnett Ratings Watch” continued on Thursday night, as Burnett attracted just 89,000 viewers in the 25-54 year old demo at 7 p.m., givng CNN a fourth-place finish in the time slot, behind Shepard Smith, Chris Matthews, and Jane Velez-Mitchell. Further confusing things? Burnett’s re-air at 11 p.m. [...]

We don’t usually get into the CNBC ratings, but it’s hard to ignore the performance of the network’s Your Money, Your Vote debate on Wednesday night. Not only did the debate’s ratings best every other show in prime time, it actually got stronger in its second hour, increasing from 947,000 viewers in the 25-54 year-old [...]

With a shout-out from Entertainment Weekly boosting its place in the public eye, FOX News’ The Five produced its highest ratings in the show’s history on Monday night, attracting 460,000 viewers in the 25-54 year-old demo. The Five, FOX News’ multi-headed replacement for Glenn Beck, debuted in July and has gathered a respectable following over [...]

Vinnie Politan, host of HLN’s Prime News, rebounded nicely from a Tuesday night low of 45,000 viewers in the 25-54 year-old demo to capture his second straight second-place finish in the 6 p.m. time slot, besting Al Sharpton and John King with 208,000 demo viewers on Friday night (he pulled 204,000 on Thursday). In fact, Politan’s demo numbers were behind just Rachel Maddow‘s for the highest among non-FOX News shows. He had better numbers than any show on HLN and CNN, and even took down the mighty MSNBC late-night specials.

Ah, Wolf Blitzer. The second-place spot hardly knew you. A day after getting his highest ratings at 5 p.m. since October 3, Blitzer stumbled badly, attracting just 85,000 viewers in the 35-54 year-old demo. His numbers were the lowest on CNN’s schedule Tuesday night, and he barely beat HLN’s 5 p.m. special, squeezing out a 7,000 viewer victory in the demo. Things didn’t get much better for CNN in the next hour, either, as John King brought in 96,000 demo viewers, falling far behind Bret Baier and Al Sharpton. The good news for CNN? Anderson Cooper, who got the network their only second-place demo finish of the night, at 8 p.m.

In the fallout of the Herman Cain sexual harassment story, Ann Coulter has quickly become one of the most prominent voices defending the Republican presidential candidate, calling racism against him and other black conservatives for their politics. She went a step further on Hannity last night, claiming that “our [conservative] blacks are so much better better than their blacks,” and tonight she proved to Joy Behar she didn’t just say that because she was among ideological friends.

Somewhat fittingly, on Halloween, Wolf Blitzer had his highest-rated show in weeks, pulling in approximately 199,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo at 5 p.m. He finished ahead of Chris Matthews by just 1,000 viewers, but lagged behind The Five by 100,000. His 199,000 demo viewers also gave him the win on CNN’s slate, besting Anderson [...]

Not only is Herman Cain denying claims that he sexually harassed two former employees over a decade ago, he is also casting doubt on whether a second accusation even exists.

On Tuesday, HLN host Robin Meade looked back at how Cain has handled the allegations since news of these claims were first reported by Politico. Cain has repeatedly said he was not aware of any settlement made with his accuser, later clarifying that he had been aware that an “agreement” had been reached. Are these statements, Meade asked him, inconsistent?

Friday nights are always a little weird — MSNBC shows prison documentaries, and plenty of 25-54 year-olds are out from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., doing 25 to 54 year-old things. But Friday night had a few other elements in the mix — Monica Crowley was guest-hosting for Sean Hannity at 9:00, while On The Record ran a special on the economy at 10:00. The result? An unorthodox night of numbers, with FOX taking the first four time slots and MSNBC taking the final three (FOX, it must be noted, ruled primetime overall, continuing its dominance).

Martin London, who discovered the body of his late son-in-law Mark Madoff following Mark’s suicide, visited Joy Behar‘s HLN show Thursday to share a letter he had written — but hadn’t sent — to Mark’s father, Bernie Madoff.