Steve Krakauer

The Christiane Amanpour as "This Week" host experiment so far is a huge failure for ABC as ratings have plummeted since she took over the Sunday political talk show.

Last Sunday's program attracted 29 percent less viewers than the same day a year ago.

Making matters worse for ABC executives is the fact that Amanpour's numbers are far worse than interim host Jake Tapper's who did most of the anchoring after George Stephanopoulos left for "Good Morning America."

As Steve Krakauer reported Monday, the decision to bring Amanpour over from CNN is so far not looking like a good one:

In the past six days, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting some liberal media member claiming that Fox News was responsible for Shirley Sherrod's dismissal from the Agriculture Department.

So obsessed with this idea were the folks on PBS's "Inside Washington" Friday that the lone conservative on the panel Charles Krauthammer had to defend FNC's honor like a knight in shining armor protecting a princess from a gang of marauding Huns.

Two days later, CNN's Howard Kurtz and Politics Daily's Matt Lewis did their darnedest to convince Salon's Joan Walsh of the facts - unfortunately to no avail.

Getting fed up with the stupidity from his colleagues on the left, Mediaite's Steve Krakauer Sunday evening tried to once and for all put this matter to rest:

Obviously uncomfortable without someone stroking his over-sized ego, Keith Olbermann has been spending his much-needed vacation chatting with his fans on the social networking website Twitter.

Since joining in April, MSNBC's hottest property has actually sent 3,000 messages to his followers.

That's over 800 "tweets" per month.

But this has greatly increased during his vacation. As Steve Krakauer reported Friday, Olbermann even stayed up till four in the morning doing this one day last week:

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Olbermann responds with a vulgarity.

At the end of Friday's "Countdown," Keith Olbermann announced what will be considered good news to all the folks at MSNBC that despise him.

"I`m Keith Olbermann, taking a couple of weeks vacation off now. So we`ll see you whatever two weeks from today is."

This came just moments after he told his small number of viewers:

That`s "Countdown" for June 28th -- it`s not June 28th, is it? June 28th? It said June 28th up here. It`s July 16th, isn`t it? My goodness, I thought I was having another seizure. 

Despite it likely not being a surprise to readers that Olbermann doesn't know what day it is, that's certainly a sign one needs some time off (video follows with transcript and commentary):

According to the Daily Caller's Tucker Carlson, people that work for MSNBC hate Keith Olbermann. 

"I'm not saying every person at MSNBC despises him but I would say he's the most disliked person in the building by a factor of 10," Carlson told Mediaite's Steve Krakauer.

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, the Daily Caller recently purchased KeithOlbermann.com.

With this in mind, Krakauer and company couldn't wait to chat with the former MSNBCer about the purchase and the object of most conservatives' disaffection (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

[Update, 2:22 pm Eastern: CNN.com put up an article on Nasr's "leaving" at 12:31 pm Eastern on Thursday, just before this item went up. H/t: NewsBusters reader johnny dollar.]

Both CNN and CNN.com have punted on the firing of Octavia Nasr, the network's senior editor of Middle East affairs, after she mourned the death of Islamist cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, "one of Hezbollah's giants," to use her own phrase, on Twitter. None of CNN's on-air programming nor the website has mentioned her "leaving the company" since the news broke on Wednesday afternoon.

Mediaite's Steve Krakauer posted an item on Nasr at 3:38 pm on Wednesday which included the text of an internal memo from CNN International's Senior Vice President Parisa Khosravi which, as Hot Air's Ed Morrissey pointed out, "makes it clear that this was no resignation:"

People on the Left squawked in January when a poll was released finding Americans felt the Fox News Network was BY FAR the most trusted name in news.

On Sunday, the results of a new online survey were released by a liberal entity somewhat confirming the Public Policy Polling data NewsBusters shared with you earlier in the year.

According to the "60 Minutes"/Vanity Fair poll, when asked the question, "Which one of the following do you consider to be the most trustworthy source of daily news in the United States," 32 percent of respondents answered CNN and 29 percent said FNC.

CBSNews.com reported the complete results:

As we've noted before, David Shuster has not been shy in the past when it comes to using Twitter to push his left-wing views. But the MSNBC host has been oddly silent since late January, following attacks he made against conservative activist James O'Keefe on Twitter.

Well last night, thanks to a slip-up in which he inadvertently tweeted what he intended to be direct messages sent privately to a fan, Shuster revealed what many of us around here at NewsBusters have suspected all along: MSNBC execs put the liberal host in the time-out corner when it comes to Twitter.

Shuster apparently realized his mistake and deleted the accidental tweets, but Mediaite got the screen capture (shown at right) before they were deleted.

Here's an excerpt of Steve Krakauer's February 17 story:

"I will say that when I started [at MSNBC] in 2003, nobody spoke to me for six months. I was a strange man in a strange land," Joe Scarborough is reported to have told Time magazine.

TVNewser's Steve Krakauer noted today that in an upcoming 10 Questions feature the "Morning Joe" host will share his thoughts about his network, which he sees, "right now" to be "a free marketplace of ideas where everybody's invited and opinions clash."

Scarborough added that "as long as I'm fair, I don't think there's a problem at all." There's no word, however, on if Scarborough thinks fairness is strived at by his colleagues Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann.