Kieth Olbermann has been given his walking papers after Comcast purchased NBC News.

Here is the latest from Nielsen and the cable news wars. Note O'Reilly at the top by a considerable margin, even against his own network compadres. His nemeses at MSNBC, the very angry, never married, Keith Olberman ran almost 2 million viewers behind. Glenn Beck has dropped from a solid second place rating to 5th, with a million less viewers in this current set of numbers than six months ago but nearly 700,000 per night ahead of Olbermann.

FOXNEWS O'REILLY 2,918,000
FOXNEWS HANNITY 2,079,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 1,940,000
FOXNEWS SHEP 1,786,000
FOXNEWS BECK 1,780,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 1,460,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,106,000
CNN PIERS 1,025,000
MSNBC MADDOW 976,000
MSNBC O'DONNELL 855,000
MSNBC SCHULTZ 760,000
CNN COOPER 740,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 700,000

I am surprised that Chris Matthews runs dead last on this list, something that is the case in nearly every weekly Nielsen ratings. What has forever changed, however, is the Keith Olbermann. We will no longer see his angry face on the tube.

GE recently sold 51% of its shares in NBC News to the more conservative leaning, Comcast. Olbermann is the first causality. And what a kindly gift it is.

Without a doubt, Olbermann was the angriest Lefty on network cable news. Well, maybe Ed Shultz but who listens to that fellow?

Anyway, there is no doubt that Olbermann was told that his time had come and gone and no one on the Right will even remember him a year from now. We (Midknight Review) were part of a write-in campaign to get him off Sunday Night Football. It took two years but he was finally taken off the set. And now, his inconsequential rants will no longer be heard. His growing disappointment in MSNBC and the president he once supported will no longer be a public event. He was a classless buffoon who pretended to be a raving intellectual. The fantasy that he was actually accomplishing something important has been dashed and the support team he once thought "had his back" has gone the way of the financially expedient.

In tonight's MSNBC programing, there was his final program, the Rachel Maddow show and then, and then, and then non-news programing for the rest of the night. They don't do weekend news because they do not have the commercial support to do so and Olbermann was a part of the reason why MSNBC could not sell tickets to their show.

Update: 1/22/2011: wouldn't you know it; many in the major old media are trying to make Olbermann's departure from MSNBC a well planned event on the part of Olbermann, giving him wealth and a gateway to new opportunities. In the end, however, the truth is simply that Olbermann was a babbling buffoon with nothing to be said that he had not repeated hundreds of times. He was angry and tiresome - reasons enough explaining why he has never been married. We are done with his rhetorical tripe and the personal story of his firing by the new landlord, Comcast.
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