As many of you know, al Jazeera America makes its debut as a cable news station tomorrow. It will appear on the same station that used to be home to Current TV. I realize that for the overwhelming majority of Americans, that last statement does not help since they don't watch Current TV and since most have never even heard of Current TV. Nevertheless, al Jazeera hopes to keep as many of the estimated 25,000 viewers of Current TV nationwide as possible. Some other cable stations that have the audience most likely to switch to al Jazeera are making moves to try to head that off. Today we learned that Ed Schultz is moving back to the early evening lineup on MSNBC. Schultz is replacing the first showing of the Chris Matthews Show at 5 eastern time. Rumor is that at that same time al Jazeera is showing the Muamar Ibn Farouk show which features public beheadings direct from the Sudan, Iran and Pakistan. On off days, they will only show thieves having their hands cut off. They were going to have, as a regular feature, a panel of women discussing the issues of the day, but the test audiences found it disconcerting to be unable to tell which of the women was speaking because all of their faces were covered by burqas. Apparently MSNBC thought that Chris Matthews was no match for such fare so they brought back the screaming voice of insanity, Ed Schultz. Interestingly enough, it was just a few months back that MSNBC dumped Schultz out of the prime time lineup due to a lack of audience.
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