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They know their relevance is ending when the 20 somethings that used to watch them while eating cheetos are now turning 30 and are bored with their childish humor.

Got a source for that? My Googling turned up this:

Vs. last summer, ratings for “The Daily Show” were up +10% among Adults 18-49, +22% among Adults 18-34, up +20% among Men 18-34 and up +15% among Men 18-24. Viewership grew +9% to 2.2 million Total Viewers (P2+)

  Vs. last summer, ratings for “The Colbert Report” were up +9% among Adults 18-49, +18% among Adults 18-34, up +13% among Men 18-34 and up +12% among Men 18-24. Viewership grew +9% to 1.5 million Total Viewers (P2+)

Unless that's factually incorrect, it would appear that they're relevance is increasing rather than decreasing and these rallies may be an attempt to publicly show their relevance to a country that's gotten the impression that the tea party groups are much more relevant than they actually are.

If enough people like what you say, you'll get sponsors, donations, air time. If people don't like what you say you don't. There's nothing saying that someone has to provide to you the means to distribute your speech. You're free to start at the bottom, craft your message and go as far as you can.

There's a reason why beck, hannity, o'rielly and fox news are doing so well. People like what they say. If what they were saying wasn't interesting to people then Rupert Murdoch et all would not have them on their networks. If they don't generate ratings they get the ax. Their ratings are at their highest while msnbc/cnn are consistently behind.

http://tvbythenumbers.com/category/ratings/cable-news

Please don't complain about not getting your platform if people don't like what you say. If I get up and start harping on purple ponies and aliens, no one is going to pay for me to do it.

Would you consider Wolf Blitzer or Chris Matthews to be mainstream? Well this is how they compare: http://tvbythenumbers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/2010.01.31-5pm-P2+-590x455.png For the record Beck is a clown and even I as a libertarian find his antics painful to watch but you can't dispute his numbers. So you might as well start weeping for your countrymen.

Most Americans don't watch Fox News.

That's funny. They have more viewers than all of their competitors combined.

But yeah, no one watches them.

But what if it kick-starts a world-wide audience of 1 million people willing to pay $10.00 for a season?

Just to keep it in perspective-- A very popular, broad-appeal hit show like "Glee" generally get about 5 million viewers a night, but they don't have to pay anything to watch it. A one-hour scripted drama can cost anywhere from $1 mil to $5 mil an episode.

You're damn right, I have to get home to watch television for 5 or so hours. I have precious little free time and I will not waste it increasing the safety of myself and those around me.

All the obvious product placement and subtle placement in trashy reality shows ("lets 'bing' it") probably haven't hurt either.

If they would move past "Infotainment" and got back to writing good "News" instead of creating "Crisis" and attacking an administration simply to raise advertising funding I'd be inclined to buy a newspaper to read.

You seem to be confusing newspapers with cable TV. The print-dominated era of "you give me the pictures and I'll give you the war" is long past. All the synthetic-outrage action has moved to cable.

Today's typical American newspaper is tame to the point of being lame, filled with a mix of generic wire copy and poorly written local stories from an underpaid staff that's been cut to the bone. This endangered species typically is turning a gross profit between 10 and 30 percent of revenues even today, in the worst business recession since Herbert Hoover. The parent companies -- conglomerates that bought newspapers with borrowed money -- are in trouble because they were expecting profit margins of 20 to 40 percent on higher gross revenues than are possible today.

Newspapers aren't offending readers by taking positions -- they're offending readers by not taking positions that reinforce their prejudices. And those prejudices are being constantly fanned by the cable political-infotainment machines.

Sadly, the Nielsen ratings of the cable channels tell us clearly that people prefer to consume infotainment that reinforces their prejudices, not actual news.

Here are the prime-time ratings for last Wednesday night:
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/10/29/cable-news-ratings-for-wednesday-october-28-2009/32044#more-32044

Fox has demonstrated that if you put a raving lunatic in front of a TV camera and let him make up any lies he wants, he'll draw way more viewers than an actual news program.

This was on another news site I read:
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/10/23/hulu-com-backing-away-from-paid-model-remarks/31321

It's about how they're BACKING AWAY from the paid model.

Which is correct, do ya think?

Advertisiers don't care about DVR's because something like forty percent of more of viewers using DVRs fast forward through the ads.

Advertisers care about LIVE viewers sitting in front of the TV screen watching ads.

Go to the Web site http://tvbythenumbers.com/ which tracks the ratings of TV shows. They have a number of articles explaining how the Neilsen system works and why DVR's and Internet viewing DO NOT matter when it comes to your favorite TV show getting canceled.

Back when Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was on, I wanted to know if the show was going to be canceled, since the quality was going down and I'd heard the ratings were bad. I went over to TV By The Numbers and got an education on how that stuff works. So it was no surprise to me when TSCC got canceled. OTOH, it WAS a surprise when Dollhouse, whose ratings were even worse, got renewed. But the explanation for that is that Fox Studios cut the Dollhouse budget down so substantially that it was not unreasonable for Fox Networks to renew the show. Still, that renewal was close to a miracle for the show.

Robert Seidman and Bill Gorman at TVBTN use the ratings data provided to predict which shows will be canceled and which will be renewed. They are usually on the money as long as extraneous factors don't enter into it, such as a satellite network picking up the tab for a show and other special deals.

They also cover this whole issue of whether Neilsen ratings are accurate and the broadcast industry's reservations about it. Best source of info on the subject.

I figure, as much as anything, they are trying to de-brand the network. Some of the shows on USA appear to be generating equally strong ratings as the BSG final, with much lower production costs:

http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/03/24/battlestar-galactica-finale-blasts-away-the-competition/15054
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/cable-tv/e3ic888e7d7726537250dc61eea82e93a48

(I'm not confident that the ratings listed in those articles are a fair comparison, but the viewer totals for both Burn Notice and Royal Pains are higher than the BSG finale; I doubt those shows are ridiculously cheap, but I can't imagine they cost more than BSG)

Think again.

Lifetime gets better ratings than the Discovery channel and SciFi.

TruTV gets better ratings than CNN, the History channel or Comedy Central.

Soap, Oxygen, and the golf channel all get better ratings than G4, the military channel, biography, or BBC America.

source

The website TV By The Numbers tends to give a good idea of how well US television shows are doing in US markets.

Terminator was consistently FOX's worst prime-time show after its move to Fridays.

Unfortunately, the site just started throwing 500 Internal Server Errors or I'd link you to the page that showed that.

How about the Food Network?

Umm. You might want to do some research before you spout off on channels just because you don't watch them. The Food Network is extremely popular with the 50+ homebody/retiree crowd.

According to some site, they have more viewers than Fox news and Disney in 2008 and 2009, and they're in striking distance of Comedy Central.

As for the rest of the shows you mention, that's four out of dozens, or hundreds if you count syndication. I haven't seen any episodes of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I find it very hard to believe that anything from the Terminator franchise doesn't show people being killed on a regular basis. That was the point, after all...

I'll go ahead and take a shot at your phrasing, just to make the point.

All of which show more then "grisly murder" and "misery and failure"

More than? So you're saying they all show both grisly murder and misery and failure, but they show other stuff too? That's nice....

but Summer Glau is welcome at my place any Friday night...

Not a problem. All you have to do is meet her on a train.

WARNING!!! The flash (yuck!) clip has a commercial at the beginning of it AND the special effects you see were not in the show itself (though the head exploding thing should have been).