Keith Olbermann Overtakes O'Reilly; Morning Joe Discusses

While the overall audience for Fox News' Bill O'Reilly remains much higher than that of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, the gap is shrinking by the week, and according to TV Newser, Olbermann defeated O'Reilly in the 25-54 demographic on Friday night, the first time Olbermann has done so when O'Reilly was not in repeats or had a guest host. Many are crediting Olbermann's gains to his appearances on NBC's "Football Night in America" where Olbermann has become a halftime panelist, bringing over his "Worst Person in the World" bit to a much wider audience. As CBSNews.com's Matthew Felling speculated on Morning Joe this morning, perhaps Olbermann's move to NBC is paying dividends by exposing sports fans, who remember Olbermann from his SportsCenter days and are now checking out his cable news program.

To be fair, though, the Morning Joe team made it seem as if Olbermann had more viewers than O'Reilly overall, which he did not, but as Olbermann pointed out himself on Friday, all that he cares about (and all anyone should care about) are the demographic ratings. On that show, when we now know Olbermann was beating O'Reilly in that demo, Keith named O'Reilly his "Worst Person" for trying to distort the ratings, after Olbermann, earlier in the week, outpaced O'Reilly for half of his program.