FOX's November Surprise

Reports of Fox News' demise were greatly exaggerated. Media mavens gleefully predicted Fox News would die on the vine with an Obama WH.

Au contraire. The other cable networks are like alfalfa plants - rooting to China in search of life-giving ratings. For CNN, so much for jettisoning Lou Dobbs.  Life After Lou has been Lousy.

The Swamp's Mark Silva: Beck's.... audience - 2.67 million viewers in November - includes a 101 percent gain among the 25-54 year-olds since last year.

FOX News, of course, has been dominant in the cable ratings for some time - No. 1 in total viewers for 95 consecutive months (since January of 2002), by Nielsen Media Research's count.

But Baier's Special Report and The O'Reilly Factor scored their best month of the year in November, both in total viewership and in the 25-54 cohort.

Both CNN and MSMBC were suffering their worst months of the year, by comparison - with CNN's Anderson Cooper down 70 percent from last year among the 25-54s, Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room off 63 percent among the same crowd.

And CNN's viewership was off 25 percent in the weeks following Lou Dobbs' surprise on-air resignation, comparing the pre-Dobbs and post-Dobbs segments of November's ratings.

Bill O'Reilly's audience of 3.669 million in November included a 12 percent gain in the 24-54 audience, compared with November of last year.

CNN's Campbell Brown's audience of 696,000 was down 62 percent in the same cohort. MSNBC's Countdown with Olbermann, with 1 million viewers, also was down 62 percent among the same audience, year to year.

Even Larry King's 853,000 was off 59 percent.

And Chris Matthews, playing Hardball over at MSNBC, pulled 672,000 viewers, including 184,000 in the 25-54 bracket, off 63 percent from the previous November. It could be all that interrupting of guests that the host does.