Rachel gets the better of Sean Hannity, a new EP touts LGBT love, and Grindr tries to walk it all back one more time.

Turn Left and Cough

The Rachel Maddow Show trounced GOP mouthpiece Sean Hannity in March, giving the MSNBC host her best showing to date in its 9 p.m. time slot. Maddow’s news and opinion program arrived with an average total audience of 3.058 million viewers, solidly beating Hannity’s show on FNC, which was seen by some 3.000 million. Among viewers 25-54, Maddow also won, which is the target demo advertisers most covet. Bringing up third place by a distance was CNN, which finished with 382,000 viewers aged 25-54.

Overall, MSNBC’s prospects have been improving as the nation ramps up to the midterm elections this November. The news source finished its first quarter of the year as the only cable news network to actually make audience inroads over its performance in same quarter last year. Overall, MSNBC ratings are up 30%, while both CNN and Fox News appear to be on the decline.

Hey, Mr. Tamborine Man

Folk rock legend Bob Dylan may not be contestant material for American Idol, but he is coming out singing in favor of same-sex attraction. Dylan is among a cavalcade of talents appearing on an EP called Universal Love, which reinterprets classic wedding tunes from an LGBT perspective.

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Dylan’s cover flips the script on a Frank Sinatra standard that dates back to the 1920s called “She’s Funny That Way,” which, in Dylan’s raspy baritone, now appears as “He’s Funny That Way.” The Temptations turn from their ’60s hit “My Girl” to “My Guy,” and Kesha takes on the titanic Janis Joplin barnburner by revisiting her Cheap Thrills track as “I Need A Woman to Love.”

Rolling Stone magazine veteran Anthony DeCurtis puts it this way in an essay accompanying the release: “The six songs on Universal Love: Wedding Songs Reimagined playfully upend a convention of love songs that is so enshrined that it often escapes our notice: the use of opposite sex pronouns.”

See the artists describe their participation in the project here:

Grinding to a Halt

Log onto Grindr today, and you’ll see the stentorian face of Jack Harrison-Quintana, the company’s Vice President of Social Impact, offering a video apologia for the Grindr’s sharing of user HIV status with third parties. That’s among other extremely sensitive and personal tidbits that could not only reveal much more than users want the public to know, but lead the curious close to their front doors.

As Harrison-Quintana puts it in the video post, “I want to say at the outset very clearly that we have never and would never sell any user data, especially HIV information, to advertisers or anyone else.”

Earlier this week, the company promised to stop sharing user HIV data in response to the widespread outcry over the data breach that handed users’ most delicate stats over to two separate companies in the business of “optimizing” app performance.

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Last modified: July 25, 2019