Msnbc Television Network

The on-screen and behind-scenes feuding between rivals Fox News and MSNBC, which has erupted in recent months like two kids squabbling, has gotten so loud that their parents are trying to tell them to knock it off. Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp., which owns Fox News, and Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric Co., which owns MSNBC, met up at the Microsoft CEO summit in Redmond, Wash.

Angered by an MSNBC correspondent's demeaning comment about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's daughter, aides to her presidential campaign said Friday that she might pull out of a debate planned by the cable network this month in Cleveland. Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director, cast as "beneath contempt" an on-air comment Thursday by MSNBC's David Shuster, who said Chelsea Clinton is "sort of being pimped out" as she intensifies her campaigning for her mother.

Former Times Television Critic Howard Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism in 1985, will be writing occasional commentaries about news on television and the Internet. -- It seems like a couple of centuries since His Holiness Pope Walter reigned as God's deputy on the airwaves. Even longer if you think about leave-'em-laughing funnyman Keith Olbermann.

A new women's organization is setting out to get Chris Matthews fired from his job on MSNBC, calling his treatment of women on his cable TV show sexist. The nonpartisan group, called the New Agenda, held its first meeting this week and established as one of several goals getting Matthews yanked from his long-running show, "Hardball with Chris Matthews." Matthews' contract is up for renewal next year. His plans are unclear.

After a year of explosive audience growth, the cable news channels head into 2009 buoyed by record ratings, a rare bright spot in what has otherwise been a gloomy media season. Thanks largely to avid interest in the historic presidential campaign, all of the networks scored their largest prime-time viewership in history this year -- though they suffered a steep drop in viewers after the election.

2006 marked a decline in the cable news audience -- except on MSNBC. Powered by personalities such as Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, the perennially third-place cable news network was the only one of its ilk to expand its audience last year, averaging 262,000 viewers throughout the day, up 7% over 2005. MSNBC grew even more in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic, rising by 11% to an average of 110,000.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has agreed to stay at the cable news network for four more years in a deal that gives him a broader role at NBC News, network executives said Thursday. The outspoken former sportscaster, whose nightly news program "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" has helped buoy the ratings of the third-place cable news channel, will now also contribute essays to "NBC Nightly News" and host two prime-time specials annually on the broadcast network.

Video killed the radio star -- or at least his cable TV show. NBC's decision Wednesday to cancel its simulcast of Don Imus' morning radio show is the latest development in an escalating furor that might have burned out by now, if not for the television and Internet clips that blasted Imus' comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team well beyond the hot-air belt of talk radio.

NEW YORK -- After 15 months at the helm of MSNBC, legal analyst Dan Abrams is stepping down as general manager and returning to hosting full-time, the cable news network announced Monday. In a statement, NBC News President Steve Capus praised Abrams and said his return on-air will help strengthen the network's lineup.

The folks at MSNBC's Secaucus, N.J., headquarters had something to smile about Tuesday. For the first time in almost five years, the third-place cable news channel had a prime-time victory to crow about, albeit a small one: "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" beat CNN's "Paula Zahn Now" in the key 25- to 54-year-old advertising demographic in the first quarter of 2006, according to Nielsen Media Research.