A second straight month of big breaking events proved one thing: MSNBC is a television news channel that does not gain any advantage when news is being made.

CNN, meanwhile, is never stronger than when it can flex its news muscles. And Fox News always wins.

One other trend was noticeable in May: Covering a sex-drenched trial wall to wall is exactly why HLN is in business.

The news ratings for May, which was packed with events that played extremely well on television — the freeing of three kidnapped women in Cleveland, the deadly tornado in Moore, Okla., and, for HLN especially, the Jodi Arias murder trial and conviction — were clearly helped by the public interest in those events.

The prime-time ratings for CNN, for example, jumped 97 percent among the viewers it makes money on — those ages 25 to 54, whom news advertisers seek to reach; among all viewers, the increase was still 70 percent. Those improvements came in comparison to the same month a year ago, when CNN was experiencing some of the worst ratings in its history, so some of that climb is attributable simply to reversing a historically bad trend.